Imagine 'The Hunger Games' refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.
An acerbic, poignant, and, at times, alarmingly pertinent dystopian novel ravages two malign institutions: one involving privately owned prisons, the other feeding America’s addiction to violent sports.
In his debut short story collection, Friday Black (2018), Adjei-Brenyah displayed a prodigious flair for deadpan satiric narratives set in alternate realities that often seem uncomfortably close to our own, especially regarding race and class divisions. With his first novel, he proves he can sustain his outrage, imagination, wit, and compassion for a deeper dive into the darker reaches of the American soul. As with the earlier stories, the novel is set not in the future but in a warped vision of the present in which a private consortium called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment produces duels to the death between convicted murderers before packed arenas and TV cameras. CAPE’s two most charismatic and successful gladiators are women: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker, aka Hurricane Staxxx, who are also lovers. Staxxx, who tends to weep copiously after each bloody victory, is dreading the ever nearer day when Loretta will earn her freedom, having survived and triumphed with CAPE for three years under the terms established for “clemency, commutation of sentence, or a full pardon" under the Rightful Choice Act. Protestors show up outside every CAPE death match to protest that law and the whole penal system in an all-out movement to repeal it. Meanwhile, CAPE’s corporate masters tighten their hold on the status quo (and keep their TV ratings up) as Loretta struggles against mounting odds to help Staxxx and other gladiators of varied races and genders achieve relative dignity within their imprisonment. Adjei-Brenyah displays his impressive range of tone and voice as he deftly manipulates several points of view through shifting time periods; all the while, he maintains control over the elements of his dreaded alternate America, using footnotes and asides to elaborate on the laws and customs of this world but also making direct and similarly detailed connections to the real-life, present-day state of the nation’s mass incarceration system with its brutalities and injustices. It is an up-to-the-minute j’accuse that speaks to the eternal question of what it truly means to be free. And human.
Imagine 'The Hunger Games' refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-31733-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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