A fun-to-read addition to the cyberpunk canon.
In a future where body hackers and bio-genetic juicers are at cross purposes, a brother mourning his baseball-playing sibling tries to even the odds.
Take the real-life biohacking aesthetics in self-described “future-y reporter” Kara Platoni’s We Have the Technology (2015) and the plethora of books about the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR (an acronym for extreme gene-modification technologies too complicated to explain in short order) and apply them to a weird and hopefully not prescient techno-thriller and you have a cocktail that’s one part William Gibson, one part Cory Doctorow, and a dash of generic but propulsive future noir. Our narrator, Kobo, is pretty much a bionic man with implants, new organs, and lots of cybernetic upgrades, none of which mean that much for his job as a scout for whatever Major League Baseball has morphed into. Living in the shadow of his adopted brother, JJ Zunz, the superjuiced star slugger for the “Monsanto Mets,” Kobo is doing his best. “Baseball was a nasty business,” he admits. “I told myself all the usual things. How it would be some other asshole doing the job if it wasn’t me.” When his brother dies on the field of some mysterious engineered illness, Kobo turns detective, diving into the dark ends of this future landscape to find a little truth. Like most cyberpunk that evolved over the past decades, it’s weird and sometimes gross and endlessly fascinating. In Michel’s version of the future, Neanderthals have been resurrected, cloning is routine, and playing a private dick gains all kinds of unwanted attention for Kobo, not least from Dereck T. Mouth, the malevolent owner of the Mets. Did we mention that Kobo owes millions in debt for his miraculous modifications to his medical-loan company, which badly wants its money back? It’s a dizzying world but catnip for cyberpunk fans. How do you navigate a world in which everyone is altered? In this scenario, everyone and everything might be Chekhov’s gun. Everybody duck.
A fun-to-read addition to the cyberpunk canon.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-62872-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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