Short, futuristic tales bubbling with enticing characters and details.
In this collection of four stories set in dystopian worlds, people endure diseases and furtive government control.
Although the tales in this volume don’t all take place in the same world or time, there are similarities among them. In the opening story, “The Sight Mask,” it’s been three-quarters of a century since the epidemic The Eye Death surfaced. People were suddenly going blind and dying a few months later. Fortunately, Dr. Ayumi Amador created Sight Masks that protected the populace and eventually became everyone’s sole technical device. But Amador, who’s spent her life searching for a cure with no success, soon learns a telling secret about the Governing Council. The subsequent two tales, “Two Schools” and “Two Roads,” are companion pieces. In their shared world, global legislation has banned the written word, and people communicate via speech, videos, and pictures. Governments believed writings, primarily on “the Network,” were rife with mendacity and ultimately precipitated confrontation and mass murder. But viruses have split people into two groups: water-level and air-level. The former has access to superior tech, but water folk are immune to the viruses that plague air folk. “The Lottery”—the longest story and the one starring the cat—is the tale of a future America, now a Republic, and its popular television show The Lottery. Citizens have a chance to win $100 million, at first annually but eventually on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, this reputed utopian nation, free of crime and unemployment, has an unsavory underbelly involving more than just the feline-transmitted Epsilon-A virus. Fondakowski (Out, 2017, etc.) simplifies her futuristic stories with minimal characters and concise histories of her worlds. Two tales have plot turns that, while dramatically sound, are predictable. But the author truly excels at shaping each story’s dystopia through marked characterization. “The Sight Mask,” for example, begins with a mother whose newborn may already be doomed, as a nurse is unable to affix a mask on the infant before she opens her eyes. The governments in “Schools” and “Roads” have vanquished sexism and homophobia by eliminating gender tags. But it seems discrimination still exists, with the water-level people a literal interpretation of the lower class. Fondakowski also uses nongender pronouns for every character in the two tales and deftly demonstrates other ways that players can have distinction (like the “smart-ass” student in “Schools”). This nevertheless makes the occasional slips into masculine or feminine pronouns in both stories glaringly apparent. “The Lottery” spotlights prospective winners as well as the show’s host, Carl Kent, who has a “crisis of conscience” when he becomes fed up with what the program is withholding from the audience. But the governing body, as in the other tales, seems on the verge of totalitarianism even if citizens are unaware. It’s a subtlety the author’s prose reflects, as her unadorned writing conveys complexities in straightforward terms. Carl’s immense popularity, for example, stems from various factors, including his delivery: “He was speaking from a low register, but not too low, and his voice was pure and crisp, not too treble.”
Short, futuristic tales bubbling with enticing characters and details.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 121
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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