Entertaining and inventive storytelling.
James’ novel, a blend of speculative fiction, satire, and thought experiment, explores themes of identity and morality.
A futuristic society teeters under the weight of engineered abundance and psychological manipulation. When the metaverse falters and identity politics ignite, governments partner with tech elites to covertly resurrect a failing experimental habitat: EnWorld, a dome-city sold as utopia but secretly designed as a self-contained exile for the restless and noncompliant. The story follows Birsha, a devil seeking a promotion in Satan’s corporate hierarchy. He’s assigned to enter a “living story” called A World of Evil, where he will act as “Socs,” a Socrates-like figure inserted to anchor A World of Evil’s plot. His mission is to locate and neutralize a disruptive force: Phantom Girl, aka “Tre,” a rebellious character whose growing influence is warping the story’s structure. As Birsha reads the manuscript forward and backward, he discovers that Tre has reentered the narrative as a graffiti artist whose work evolves from crude to evocative—“Satiric cartoon monkeys are an addition, and the freehand sketches of the Savior in devil guise are more skillfully rendered than before, more Henri Matisse than their original Tom and Jerry.” Her impact is so significant that the story must invent elaborate backstories to justify her presence. James’ style is cerebral and layered, blending literary, philosophical, and political references. The novel’s climax occurs during the trial of the Stephens, in which Stevo places himself on trial; the variations of Stephen across the different story and timeline iterations occupy all roles—judge, prosecutor, defense, jury, and accused. This courtroom of the self is facilitated by Birsha/Socs, who, acting as devil’s advocate literally and figuratively, prods Stevo into self-examination but increasingly wrestles with his own doubts about the mission he was sent to fulfill. The novel’s structure is recursive; it loops and refracts. Just as totalitarian regimes revise history to maintain power (e.g., erasing memory or falsifying timelines), the story revises its own past to protect its internal consistency. Cast members are emotionally rich: Birsha is ambition dressed in rationality, but his self-doubt humanizes him. Overall, James’ literary loop-the-loops result in a fun, brainy read.
Entertaining and inventive storytelling.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781632999962
Page Count: 324
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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