One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Hunger Games—and what an offspring!
Virginia, 1954: A woman identified as Dorothy Frasier awakens on a bus en route to a psychiatric hospital. But does she belong there?
There are signs that Dorothy may not belong at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, most notably her lightning-fast reflexes and her ability to quickly calculate everything from how to pick a lock to the best way to beat a creepy orderly. And then there are the flashes of “memory” that seem to jerk her back to the future: 2035, to be exact. Here she is identified as rebel leader Beatrix “Bix” Parris, and reminded that she’s been sent to 1954 in order to intercept a virus that will wreak havoc in her present time, decimating 90% of the population. Back in ’54, these “delusions,” as well as Dorothy’s general lack of compliance, lead to a “protocol” which consists of heavy sedation and multiple sessions of electroshock therapy until her husband, Paul, intervenes. In the future timeline, Bix meets her twin brother and is filled in on all the details of their lives, the virus, and their roles in the fight, including the fact that she has less than 24 hours to find her Hanover contact and take action to save the world, fighting to find her allies and evade her enemies—and possibly face some other upsets in the timeline. This novel is a cinematic ride. The genre mashup is a little daunting and overly dramatic in the beginning, but once the intrigue—and then the dystopian action—kicks in, you might as well strap in and suspend disbelief. What’s real? We don’t fully know—and it really doesn’t matter. Dorothy/Bix is a kick-ass feminist hero, and the novel comments on the horrors of 20th-century mental health “treatments” for women as well as the anarchic ravages of a virus-infested world. The word bedlam was derived from a mental hospital so infamous it now stands for absolute chaos. This novel is “bedlam” in every way.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Hunger Games—and what an offspring!Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781250358677
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.
The 25th novel featuring Silva’s legendary protagonist.
During his intersecting careers as art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon has tangled with Russian gangsters and al-Qaida terrorists. He has become well-acquainted with operatives in multiple security agencies and befriended a paid assassin. He has busted art thieves and created passable forgeries by Renaissance masters and abstract Modernists. This latest installment centers around his relationship with the pope and a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has gone missing from the Vatican. Silva’s novels tend to fall into two categories: books that reflect the politics of the day and books that don’t. His latest is one of the latter, which could be a treat for readers looking for escape, but it falls flat for a variety of reasons. Luxury has always been part of Gabriel Allon’s universe. It used to be an aspect of tradecraft, though. Allon would be wearing a very expensive suit and driving a very expensive car because he was posing as a client at a Swiss bank. Here, his wife is hosting a catered lunch for 150 of their daughter’s classmates in their apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. What once felt like a scintillating peek into the world of the obscenely wealthy now just feels…kind of obscene. Similarly, Allon goes chasing after a missing painting as a civilian—he retired from Mossad in Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022)—the same way another man his age might buy a speedboat or get hair plugs. As the story progresses, the stakes are raised, but it’s hard to forget that Allon is now a middle-aged man pursuing a dangerous hobby, rather than a spymaster leading his intrepid team to prevent a disaster that will disrupt the global order.
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063384217
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
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