A debut contemporary fantasy—which re-examines a biblical myth—follows an orphaned girl growing up inside the mansion of a tyrannical uncle.
In this first installment of a projected series, the story revolves around Patrina Nadine Palinski, a Polish girl who lost her parents in a fire when she was just a baby. Now almost 12 years old, Patrina knows nothing of life except what is within the walls of her room in a tower of her Uncle Vlad’s mansion. But her uncle remains stern and unloving; he rarely sees her. Patrina has been raised by Miriam, the girl’s nanny ever since she arrived. When Miriam begins to disclose to her charge bombshell revelations about her heritage—including that Patrina’s mother, Izabella, was a ninth-genesis nephilim, an angel-human hybrid—the sheltered girl is stunned. Discussing the different types of nephilim, Miriam explains that Izabella was a virtue: “One of the things a virtue does to keep their legacy alive is the mother passes down her knowledge, wisdom, and experiences to her daughter. Sometimes these come out as what seem to be dreams. These are not actually dreams but experiences that happened in your mother’s life.” Patrina also discovers that she is a powerful 10th-genesis nephilim and that her uncle wants to bend her to his will and use her abilities for nefarious purposes. Vlad tells her: “You are the tenth, the golden child. The one who is going to make me a lot of gold!” While uninspired plotlines featuring nephilim have inundated the shelves for the last decade, Meinema manages to breathe new life into the biblical myth with solid writing and an imaginative back story. (For example, the work describes the profound significance of the first feather when a nephilim comes of age.) Impeccably edited, the narrative is fluid, lyrical, and has an ageless, almost folkloric feel to it—this spiritual coming-of-age novel could easily be marketed as a YA release. Additionally, the author keeps the storyline focused and relatively straightforward, which makes for a briskly paced, page-turning reading experience. Fueled by an undeniably optimistic undertone—Patrina is very much a pure-hearted and hopeful heroine—this tale offers fantasy readers looking for a glimpse of light in their darkly dystopic and post-apocalyptic fare a satisfying and soul-cleansing alternative. A mystical and divinely entertaining journey of self-discovery, with a potent heroine.
Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9257-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and...
This future space fantasy might start an underground craze.
It feeds on the shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Martian series), Aeschylus, Christ and J.R. Tolkien. The novel has a closed system of internal cross-references, and features a glossary, maps and appendices dealing with future religions and ecology. Dune itself is a desert planet where a certain spice liquor is mined in the sands; the spice is a supremely addictive narcotic and control of its distribution means control of the universe. This at a future time when the human race has reached a point of intellectual stagnation. What is needed is a Messiah. That's our hero, called variously Paul, then Muad'Dib (the One Who Points the Way), then Kwisatz Haderach (the space-time Messiah). Paul, who is a member of the House of Atreides (!), suddenly blooms in his middle teens with an ability to read the future and the reader too will be fascinated with the outcome of this projection.
With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and it should interest advanced sci-fi devotees.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1965
ISBN: 0441013597
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Chilton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1965
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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