An engaging, post-apocalyptic, collapse-of-everything narrative that emphasizes character relations more than action.
Following a pandemic, an Oregon college student crosses a mostly deserted (but dangerous) America in search of her ex-lover, the estranged son of a wealthy man.
Dean offers this second installment in his Thermals of Time trilogy of post-apocalyptic adventure/drama. The first, Scream of an Eagle (2020), centered on James Mendez, the college-age son of mega-billionaire Robert Mendez, an offstage but evidently disagreeable tycoon whose Allpro food monopoly controlled a dysfunctional America of the 2030s. Things went completely to pieces with the combination of a violent uprising by embedded White supremacists in the United States military and a horrific “V-1” virus that killed millions, but which seemed to leave proportionally twice as many women as men alive. While James was last shown bereft at a homestead at the end of the previous book, this sequel opens with Anna Duran, his childhood sweetheart of mixed Native American blood, whom he was forced to abandon by his elitist dad. She is at college in Oregon when the V-1 virus hits and quickly kills her live-in fiance and most of the rest of the populace. Apparently lucky enough to have immunity, Anna begins a trek throughout the American West in hopes of somehow reuniting with James, meeting other pockets of survivors along the way. Unfortunately, gangs of bad guys from the extreme right have also lived through the catastrophe and, under a “New Army of God” banner, plan their own slave-culture nation in imitation of the old Confederacy. Anna is captured and suffers grievously. Throughout this corpse-strewn landscape of Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, branches of a new “Modern Times Church” now sprout up with their distinctive symbol of three black crosses, representing the mysterious “Mystic Martin,” who supposedly prophesied all of this. But are they benevolent or another cabal of murderous racists? Dean’s intriguing, character-driven story is very much a middle chapter of the SF saga, with players and themes introduced that seem destined only to pay off in the next installment. The plain-talk narrative still moves along at a steady pace, and Anna provides readers with a sympathetic, resilient hero (one of several, it turns out) weighing options of how to continue in a world that is much changed and, potentially, has no future in it for humankind. By the cliffhanger ending, the stakes on everything have been raised.
An engaging, post-apocalyptic, collapse-of-everything narrative that emphasizes character relations more than action.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73467-462-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: The Last Ditch Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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