Telisa and Magnus could carry a series with their entertaining if somewhat predictable smuggling adventures.
An otherworld adventure featuring a military brat turned smuggler.
McCloskey (The House of Yeel, 2012, etc) starts with what is hopefully the beginning of a new series featuring xenoarchaeologist Telisa Relachik. After the government detects the heroes upon their arrival on planet T2 in search of ruins, United Nations Space Force officer Joe Hartlet is dispatched toward this abandoned planet. But before Joe can catch up to Telisa and crew—including the handsome enforcer, Magnus—the smugglers find an odd power source accessible through a tunnel. They throw caution to the wind and, like the robotic alien life form in the prologue, take a tumble down the strange rabbit hole. What lies beneath is a constantly shifting landscape that robotic alien Shiny eventually figures out how to maneuver, only after he’s wiped out half of Telisa’s crew, leaving her alone with Magnus for guidance, protection and entertainment. Joe eventually catches up and, together with Shiny, the gang forms an uneasy alliance. It’s shattered, though, once the alien finds the exit from this mysterious hole in the ground. From there, Shiny, Telisa and Magnus escape in a smuggler’s ship—only to be hijacked by Shiny and taken to what the reader is first told is an outpost planet, but later, when Joe and the UNSF arrive, is what seems to be the original hole in the ground. It’s a confusing transition: Are they back in the mysteriously changing environment or on a new planet? Author McCloskey doesn’t make it clear. He excels, however, in bringing up the Neuromancer-inspired implanted chips that enable communication within Telisa’s society. There’s even the brief mention of the need for people to explore a new form of communication: face to face. At one point, Telisa marvels at how quiet life is without her link; she’s not sure how people survived before it. The social statement rightly falls to the wayside in favor of adventure and the questionable motives behind Shiny’s presence. Many questions remain unanswered, however, due to the book’s abrupt ending.
Telisa and Magnus could carry a series with their entertaining if somewhat predictable smuggling adventures.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466393844
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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