Ford (What We Remember, 2009, etc.) approvingly cites Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but his own...
Armed only with her vampire powers, 192-year-old Jane Austen hits the publicity trail to promote what fond readers think is her first novel.
Though the standard reference works agree that the author of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park died in 1817, they’re all wrong. After being turned into a vampire by a bite from a contemporaneous celebrity author, Jane Austen faked her own death and went into hiding. At first she sought the company of her own kind, but she drifted away from vampires and ended up as Jane Fairfax, owner of Flyleaf Books in cozy Brakeston, N.Y. The only blots on her happiness have been her inability to return the love of widowed carpenter Walter Fletcher—what would she tell him when he grew older but she didn’t?—and the 116 rejection slips awarded her novel Constance. (There’s some justice here, since excerpts employed as chapter epigraphs are rather overripe for Austen.) Now, however, the second of these trials seems to be at an end. Kelly Littlejohn of Browder Publishing loves Constance and wants to publish it in time for the beach-reading season. Jane promptly scores a spot on the TV show Comfort and Joy and an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Soon after she’s invited to a conference on romance fiction and Constance debuts as #1 on the NYTBR list. But Jane’s Cinderella story is comically curdled by her discomfort with airplanes, makeup and publicity, the need to keep her private life private, dark accusations of plagiarism—not to mention her thirst for the blood of an English professor, one of the talk-show hosts and, most satisfyingly, the philistine author of a self-help volume entitled Waiting for Mr. Darcy.
Ford (What We Remember, 2009, etc.) approvingly cites Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but his own mashup is better integrated, more knowledgeable about Austen and considerably funnier—although not quite as funny as his gorgeous premise might suggest. First of a promised trilogy.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-51365-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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