A richly imagined fantasy adventure full of slashing action and nervy psychological tension.
A motley array of competing interstellar groups battle over a futuristic world facing extreme climate change in this sci-fi novel from Palleschi.
This epic tale unfolds some 27,000 years in the future on the planet-sized moon Novena, where citizens of the Ionian Republic are migrating south to escape the looming 26-year-long winter. Unfortunately, their refuge zone in the Tawny Desert, which is beginning its lush, rainy 26-year-long spring, has been conquered by Antoine Calicchio, a trafficker in the highly addictive narcotic called Stygian. To keep the Ionians out, he imports two million Osharian religious zealots to settle and defend the region—led by the physically disabled Killian Scuro, who is also a persuasive speaker. Trying to reconquer the desert are the Ionian Knights, whose members have awesome powers channeled through crystalline geodes. Knights Sophie Song and Alex Lucien are in the thick of the action, but are then assigned to train one Isaak Kaldera, a teenage street hustler with precocious skills in geode manipulation and prophesied to play a decisive role in the conflict. They square off against Calicchio’s army of geode-wielding Camo Warriors—so named for their chameleonic armor—and Scuro’s lieutenant Dark Spectre, a man-shaped cloud who wields a flaming sword and whip. While the rival armies edge toward a climactic showdown, the narrative also follows Dante Zarr's efforts to take over his father’s mega-conglomerate, a struggle that embroils him in cutthroat family intrigues and a treasonous alliance with Calicchio.
This first book in Palleschi’s Falling into Shadows series builds a densely inhabited, variegated society in which nigh-magical future technology coexists with modern corporate skullduggery and organized crime, ancient faiths, and medievalesque military orders, all overlaid with an ominous eco-anxiety; it feels something like a mash-up of Dune and Star Wars, Alien and The Godfather. Characters run the gamut of social niches, from arrogant rich jerks to a harried government bureaucrat trying to find housing for refugees: all of them with complex psyches and mixed motives. Dante, in particular, is a compelling, Macbeth-like bundle of tragic impulses; a frustrated, insecure figure who imagines himself morally purer than his cynical father, but finds himself gradually corrupted by his own unacknowledged thirst for power and manhood. Palleschi’s muscular, evocative prose delivers gripping combat scenes with whimsical gadgets wreaking colorful carnage. (“The spinning disc sprayed a glowing red liquid in all directions. The Knights generated shields, but one was not quick enough, and the viscous fluid sliced his body to ribbons”). The author also subtly dissects the hypocrisies and lies that his characters tell themselves to ease their spiritual disintegration. The result is a page-turner with real psychological depth.
A richly imagined fantasy adventure full of slashing action and nervy psychological tension.Pub Date: May 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798991619301
Page Count: 516
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2025
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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