A moody mix of semi-apocalyptic paranoia and offbeat romance.
In Gervasi’s SF novel set in a famine- and cancer-plagued world, a Russian commando and his team aim to abduct an American doctor whose forbidden research may lead to a possible cure.
In an alternate version of the mid-2020s, global famine, mass extinctions, and the mysterious exhaustion of soil and water all threaten humankind. A corporate-run fascist American government concocted a profitable formula to increase crop production and now holds a world food monopoly—but cancers and birth defects have spiked both at home and abroad. In Minneapolis, 26-year-old Caitlyn Svendsen defiantly tries to unravel the government’s secret formula and fight what the docile public accepts: “The health crisis was camouflaged as the new normal. As if a sixty-three percent cancer rate among the population could possibly be normal.” The rest of the planet is not so willing to ignore the crisis. Russia spearheads an alliance (including Mexico, Japan, and Israel) to blitzkrieg the American coasts, wipe out Food Traitors (a group based in Washington, D.C.), and seize the heartland. Russian hackers have been monitoring Caitlyn and her suppressed research; Commander Kaleb Volkov, a legendary operative of the fearsome Spetsnaz special forces, and his team are to infiltrate Minnesota and bring Caitlyn to Moscow to brew up a cure. But Kaleb, masquerading as an American officer, has become infatuated with Caitlyn (whom he calls his “Viking princess”), as she turns out to be fierce, indomitable, and good with guns. But Caitlyn despises Kaleb, despite his declarations of devotion and protection, and she demands sanctuary in neutral Canada. This is high-octane plot material that’s bracing in its portrayal of both the United States and Russia as nests of evil and corruption. The novel may not satisfy a readership that may be hoping for epic-scale combat ops; instead, the work is closer to a thriller-romance with its genre-mainstay enemies-to-lovers arc. (Readers will likely visualize an Arnold Schwarzenegger type as the muscular Kaleb.) The book does feature some occasional violence, including torture, plus weighty themes of betrayal, guilt, Eastern European folklore, and fatalism, all of which add a kick to this killer-boy-meets-tough-girl dystopian series opener.
A moody mix of semi-apocalyptic paranoia and offbeat romance.Pub Date: July 31, 2026
ISBN: 9798994658000
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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