An often lively space romp with touches of comedy and kink.
In an alternate near future, a ferocious young human militia fighter grapples with her desire for her hard-bodied alien comrade in arms in this erotic SF adventure.
Mars continues the seriocomic series Love Wars, which began with Moving Jack (2019). Here, the plot, set in 2025, connects two frenemies from previous volumes. One is soldier Jill, who explains herself in profanity-laden diary entries; they’re set in the context of a contentious relationship between endangered humanity and the Staraban, a species of golden-skinned, twin-hearted alien humanoids. Jill grew up within Make Aliens Dead, a militia/survivalist cult of alien-hating renegades in California’s Pinnacles National Park. Indeed, she’s the daughter of the top MAD man—a brutal leader who calls himself Bulldog. However, she’s joined the Staraban and their diverse human allies, which include supernatural beings such as vampires and people who can shape-shift into animals (particularly bears). Jill’s self-described “defection” earned her a death sentence from her pitiless parent, who moves MAD toward terrorist tactics, including kidnapping and threatening Staraban and humans alike. Jill must return from her deep-space capers to fight MAD, which may mean killing her own father, whom she despises. The spaceship journey puts her in close quarters with Nial, a Staraban warrior with whom she has a lust-hate relationship, and sparks fly. Over the course of this wild novel, readers will quickly get the sense that the prime directive of the series is to present events that intimately pair infinitely diverse characters in infinite combinations. Sinewy Nial treats Jill condescendingly, although she secretly fascinates him, and their erotic relationship effectively results in lots of steamy fan service; one passage, for instance, describes Jill’s thighs as “a masterpiece of muscular definition,” and her genitalia’s scent causes Nial’s mouth to water. In comparison to this lustful relationship, the quasi-military intrigues and raids back on Earth seem rather perfunctory, with a finale that offers readers a literal deus ex machina climax.
An often lively space romp with touches of comedy and kink.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2023
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
