An interplanetary biker-squad romp that’s less cheesy than the Russ Meyer–esque premise suggests.
Three very different young women in a space-traveling future form a quasi-successful criminal gang.
Set in an unspecified, spacegoing future, Vibbert’s novel revolves around the conceit of “solo-flyers”—zippy little one-seater (very occasionally two-seater) minispaceships, capable of faster-than-light travel. The technology occupies a niche akin to that of motorcycles. The author’s native Cleveland, Ohio, makes an appearance (pretty much as dingy and unfashionable as the present-day Cleveland) as the territory of Ki, a petite, young petty crook, con artist, and aspiring adventurer, who inherits a swanky solo-flyer from a boyfriend dying of a genetic ailment. While joyriding within the solar system, Ki meets Margot, almost her complete opposite. Former low-ranking military and now unable to find a job, the ultracautious Margot has, untypically, overspent her budget on a solo-flyer; she dreads having to go back and live with her stifling Vietnamese parents on Luna. Ki drags her into a police chase and then a fortune-hunting excursion to the distant, exotic planet of Ratana. There, they find a third kindred spirit, Zuleikah, a poor-little-rich-girl member of Ratana’s nobility, for whom solo-flyers are an escape from the boredom of aristocracy. The incorrigible Ki pronounces their trio an official criminal gang—the Galactic Hellcats—and they fumblingly try to pull off their first big caper, the kidnapping of Ratana’s handsome Prince Thane. The prince turns out to be gay and closeted, unhappy in his royal role, and a pawn in a brewing palace coup that was going to put him in jeopardy anyway. Not quite as outwardly comedic as it sounds, the material zips along in extravagant space-opera fashion, with the subplot about Prince Thane making a sort of straight-faced salute to vintage Ruritanian adventure yarns of yesteryear. It overall plays breezily and well, considering the author is revisiting a premise she started drafting in adolescence. Fans of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series might take especially well to these idiosyncratic space outlaws, and the material’s gender switches on character roles do not feel forced or gimmicky. The result is a noncondescending space ride suitable for savvy YA readers as well as older genre fans.
An interplanetary biker-squad romp that’s less cheesy than the Russ Meyer–esque premise suggests. (acknowledgments)Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952283-07-9
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Vernacular Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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