Pulls no punches.
The follow-up to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014), set in a broken U.S. decades after a pandemic has killed most of the population.
In the town of Nowhere, women essentially have two life paths: They can try to bear a child (an enterprise which frequently kills both mother and baby) or train as Midwives and help other women. But Etta has rejected both possibilities: Instead, she is a raider, traveling outside the town to battle slavers and rescue girls and young women from their clutches. But what no one in Nowhere knows is that Etta does more than simply dress as a man when she leaves town: She actually takes on a male persona, calling himself Eddy. Unable to face the restrictions of being Etta, desperate to realize himself more fully as Eddy and find someone who will love his true self, Eddy makes various journeys away from home on his self-imposed rescue missions, interacting with several societies that each has a different way of dealing with the realities that biological men significantly outnumber biological women and children are a rarity. Eventually, although he tries desperately to avoid it, Eddy will be forced to revisit the one place he really doesn’t want to go: Estiel (the former St. Louis), the city controlled by the vicious warlord known as the Lion and the place of a devastating past trauma. Eddy is a fascinatingly complex character, shifting back and forth between female and male identities. His personal journey toward self-realization is made more difficult by the rigidity of his viewpoints about gender, love, and what values cannot be compromised, even for survival in a fairly brutal landscape. That inflexibility, plus his rape as a teenager and his strong preference for biological women, makes it impossible for him to accept the love of Flora, a transwoman and former sex slave, even though she accepts and understands him more than anyone else. Sadly, that rejection helps to hasten the plot’s devastating climax and is a realistic portrayal of how one’s own struggles don’t necessarily instill an immediate empathy for others’ situations.
Pulls no punches.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4182-3
Page Count: 314
Publisher: 47North
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2019
Hyperspeed high-tech froth, sometimes exciting but about as involving as watching Godzilla slug it out with King Kong.
Previously, in Echelon (2006), agents Ryan Laing and Sarah Peters managed to destroy the ultra-secret surveillance, command and control network by which means the United States arranged world affairs to suit its own interests.
Now, alas, ECHELON has mutated into EMPYRE, with terrorism as its primary tool. Ryan, still full of the nanomachines that render him nearly invulnerable, climbs mountains in Antarctica. Sarah, obsessed with adding cyborg enhancements to her body, has blundered into the web of mysterious arch-spymaster Phoenix and his fanatical, brainwashed assassin Zachary Taylor. Unbeknownst to Sarah, Phoenix has turned her into a Typhoid Mary—so when she comes before EMPYRE’s committee, Phoenix throws the switch, and Sarah exudes a plague that decimates not only EMPYRE but the entire CIA. EMPYRE’s chief, Andrew Dillon, barely survives and orders CIA loyalist Frank Savakis to grab Sarah and Ryan, who share a link through their implants. Dillon tortures Ryan, partly from revenge, partly because he thinks Ryan can help him locate Sarah, who’s helplessly releasing new plagues at the command of Phoenix while being hunted by every law enforcement official on the planet. Ryan, however, escapes Dillon and seeks a way to assist Sarah via an old ally that helped them bring down ECHELON. Then, in chapter two—well, not quite, but it seems as though things move that fast—we learn that Phoenix secretly has been controlling EMPYRE all along, and his plans for world domination make EMPYRE look like a group of boy scouts.
Hyperspeed high-tech froth, sometimes exciting but about as involving as watching Godzilla slug it out with King Kong.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-48503-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Near/medium-future deep-sea endeavor, from a Toronto-resident newcomer. To tap the energy of ocean-floor hydrothermal vents, the powerful Grid Authority sets up a power station in the Juan de Fuca Rift west of Seattle. Humans, physically modified to be able to live and work underwater without the restrictions of diving equipment, will maintain the facility. Of these volunteers (sex criminals, psychopaths, wife-beaters, and child molesters: their alternative is brainwashing), some can—t adapt to the crushing, claustrophobic environment. Others brim with suppressed violence. Gerry Fischer takes to eating the local wildlife and never returns to the station. Lenie Clarke suspects that all the members of the group have been deliberately mentally damaged so they won’t want to leave. But the Rifters develop a telepathic awareness of each other’s thoughts and feelings. On the surface, meanwhile, smart gels—jelly-like intelligent neural networks—run most of the equipment and are slated to replace the Rifters, who refuse to return to the surface. The Grid Authority learns that the Rifters, and all deep-water life-forms, harbor an archaic non-DNA microorganism, ·ehemoth, that would destroy all DNA-based life if it reached land. At the same time, Lenie discovers on the ocean floor a nuclear bomb operated by a smart gel; it will trigger a devastating earthquake should ·ehemoth escape. Problem is, nobody at the Grid Authority understands how the smart gels evaluate information. What if the gels prefer ·ehemoth to orthodox life-forms? Plenty of first-novel flaws—poor organization, drifting points of view, an inconsistently applied, tough-to-read present-tense narrative—but fizzing with ideas, and glued together with dark psychological tensions: an exciting debut.
Pub Date: July 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86855-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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