A sleek, absorbing tale of motherhood, feminism, and the potential dangers of technology.
A woman in near-future America slowly realizes that her life may be under someone else’s control in this SF novel.
Vera Elpis lives what many would describe as a typical life. She has a steady job digitizing medical files at a document processing center and seems to prefer quiet solitude. Yet something is missing; she longs to be a mother, but regular fertility treatments have all failed. In the meantime, she revels in being an “Auntie” to her cousin Jennifer’s son and her friend Sarah Bennington’s three kids. Jennifer is the only family Vera knows; in fact, she can’t recall much before a car accident that resulted in an apparent brain injury. She’d certainly like to know more about who she had been. How, for instance, does she know the name of every plant in a garden? She’s a highly intelligent woman, so why does she have an “impulse to hide” among others who barely acknowledge her existence? One day, Vera’s hunt for answers as to why she’s unable to get pregnant finally turns up something—and it’s a shocker. Vera’s life may not truly be hers, as people have intentionally kept her in the dark concerning her foggy past. This big reveal has a tie to the tech company Perilaus Bionics, where Jennifer works and Sarah did, too, before she became a stay-at-home mom. As Vera continues to dig, she unearths ugly truths but also finds a way, however grim it may be, to regain the personal control that some have stripped away.
Woodsey delivers a hard–SF tale heavily steeped in metaphor. For starters, there are copious signs of realistic tech. Bots pop up almost everywhere, delivering food or cleaning windows, and Perilaus pioneered the use of microfilaments in prosthetics. As the title suggests, who or what has control is constantly in question, whether it’s advanced technology or simply a person. Vera has a manageable life; she excels at work and has no financial woes thanks to an inheritance. But she faces countless daily hurdles, especially as a woman. A male co-worker mocks her for being an exceptional employee, and she gets so much unwanted attention from male colleagues that she tries drowning it out with music in her headphones. Woodsey stylizes this narrative as Vera’s journal, which she begins at a doctor’s behest and maintains for personal reflections. As such, readers will sympathize with her, a woman who craves love while struggling to comprehend the affection Sarah has for her insolent husband. Vera’s intimate perspective likewise makes her perpetually simmering anger understandable as she fights to control it. Her fury stems from both global troubles (for example, massive cyberattacks) as well as things that are seemingly innocuous. As the story progresses, intrigue and a discernible SF element amp up. A highlight is Vera and Sarah’s conversations inside the latter’s makeshift Faraday cage—a basement tent of “metal mesh” and plenty of tinfoil blocking nosy transmissions. It perfectly suits the novel’s growing conspiracy, which leads to a gleefully dizzying final act that, while providing closure, is open to interpretation.
A sleek, absorbing tale of motherhood, feminism, and the potential dangers of technology.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0997333978
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
