A gentle story of hope and family connection.
In Mawhiney’s SF debut, an Earth on the road to ecological recovery relies on the burgeoning powers of a teenage girl.
Fifty years into the future, Earth has been pulled back from the brink of ecological disaster. This is largely thanks to the Earth Project (a reclamation initiative using advanced technology) and inclusive but ruralizing post-plague societal reforms. This new way of life is exemplified in Land of Hope, a four-generational farmstead that began as a pilot project and has become the epicenter of change. Fifteen-year-old Fania and her 12-year-old sister, Nuna, are the youngest members of a matriarchal family headed by their great-grandmother Alicia, who, along with her husband, Nide, initiated the Earth Project. Fania has just returned from her Immersion—two years of isolated study during which 13-year-olds hone their aptitudes and determine their strengths. Unlike her peers (and Nuna, who exhibits a prodigious musical talent), Fania doesn’t know what her contribution will be. Her potential is too great to pin down. She is apprenticed to Alicia to learn more about her family history…and the dark secrets that underlie the Earth Project. Will Fania come to heal the past and safeguard the future? Mawhiney employs an omniscient narrative viewpoint across four generations of characters. These initially prove difficult to distinguish from one another, and some of the shifts occur with little indication. Nonetheless, distinct personalities emerge—most obviously in Fania, Nuna, and Alicia but also, more subtly, in the rest of the family. While not without foibles, the characters are all uniformly good, perhaps to a fault, and also gifted in some way. The lack of traditional antagonist or crisis, however, lends a bleak mood to the novel’s more challenging, dystopian elements. Rather than focus on conflict, though, the plot and pacing reflect Fania’s personal growth and, by extension, that of her community and the planet more broadly. The result is a positive, optimistic depiction of the future, albeit one that relies on metaphysical as much as societal change.
A gentle story of hope and family connection.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-03-910967-4
Page Count: 285
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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