This engrossing and gritty survival romance pulls no punches in revealing its enviro-economic dystopia.
Having uncovered a secret that could bring down corporate overlords, a scavenger in post-apocalyptic America goes on the run with an itinerant train-hopper in this novel.
In 2195, 20-year-old Elsa lives with her great-grandmother Granny Lee in SoCal (formerly Southern California), a political prison-cum-slum defined not by guards or walls but rather by economic privation and the bullying oversight of GreenCorps. This corrupt, exploitative organization rose to power under the pretense of salvaging the environment and upholding civilization after the plague-driven societal Collapse. Elsa and Granny Lee work the Heap, a mound of garbage whose layers date back to the early 21st century. Elsa digs while Granny Lee stands guard with her shotgun, “which she wasn’t shy about using.” They trade scrap metal for food and water tokens. Life is tough but bearable until 22-year-old Walker and his adopted brother, Hayden, come along. The men are “hoppers” (itinerants who sneak passage aboard trains), and Hayden has a drug habit. In trying to rob Granny Lee, Hayden leaves her injured and unable to work. Without Granny Lee’s protection, Elsa is forced to take a job serving drinks in a brothel. Walker, too, has found work there (as a bouncer). When he saves Elsa from being brutally raped by a GreenCorps man, the two flee SoCal on the trains, taking with them her last find: a metal tube that contains maps to six pre-Collapse seed vaults. With a price on their heads, can Elsa and Hayden keep clear of their GreenCorps pursuers? Gibson writes in the third person, primarily from Elsa’s and Walker’s perspectives but occasionally from those of teenage pickpocket Tatsuda and widowed ex-rebel Caitlyn. In this series opener, the prose is polished, the dialogue unobtrusive, affording no distraction from Elsa’s bleak life. The world portrayed, while one of extreme hardship, seems very much in keeping with current societal trends. One particularly sobering aspect of this is the disproportionate helplessness experienced by women, especially regarding sexual violence. Elsa’s matter-of-fact wariness of vigilante rape is a disquieting precursor of what she faces in the brothel. Elsa and Walker are relatable characters in whose plight—and romance—readers will invest. Though downbeat in content, the story is light on its feet and moves with assurance toward the sequel.
This engrossing and gritty survival romance pulls no punches in revealing its enviro-economic dystopia.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9781685133641
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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