A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space.
A workplace drama set in the 22nd century on a spaceship orbiting a distant planet.
Aboard the interstellar spacecraft the Six Thousand Ship, Earth-born humans and their bioengineered humanoid counterparts work together according to well-established company protocols. Their mission is to curate and tend the mysterious, alluring, and perhaps even sentient objects brought up from the surface of New Discovery, the Earth-like planet whose exploration is the Six Thousand Ship’s mission. The ship itself is tightly run, with employees in place for every conceivable need—be it laundry, reeducation, or cremation—and the labor does not seem to be difficult. It soon becomes apparent, however, that something is disrupting the workflow on the Six Thousand Ship. The objects are impacting their human and humanoid caretakers in different ways; eliciting erotic responses in some, paranoia in others, an uneasy sense of maternal responsibility or a near catatonic state of existential quandary in still others of the crew. In concordance with, or perhaps as the result of, the growing sense that the objects exist “in communion” with the employees, a rift between the human, and therefore mortal, and the humanoid, and therefore capable of being endlessly “reuploaded,” workers is having deleterious—even dangerous—effects on workplace productivity. To address this problem, a committee of impartial mediators has spent the last 18 months interviewing crew members and compiling the resulting recordings into the document of this book. The result is both familiar in its petty irritations and clandestine attractions (“In the line in the canteen I suddenly realize I feel a kind of tenderness for Cadet 14”) and unsparingly strange confessions (“I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught up under my nails like fish eggs....I feel this has something to do with the objects in the rooms”) that bode ill for the increasingly fractious crew. In place of a dedication, Ravn gives thanks to installation artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund for the material inspiration for the book, yet, even without knowing what Hestelund’s work looks like, the world Ravn has created is familiar enough in its tropes and human(oid) emotions to infect the reader’s imagination.
A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3135-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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