A bleak but moving ode to the power of community.
Survivors struggle in a post-apocalyptic America in Hughes’ speculative novel.
In the era of doomsday preppers and climate change, many readers likely wonder how they would fare if our civilization collapsed; this ambitious debut novel posits what America might look like if the worst aspects of modern society progress. As the effects of global warming become more severe, new illnesses and natural disasters sweep the nation as the air grows thick with “clag,” a slang term for dirt and smog. The collapse of the federal government and local infrastructure leads to the founding of a series of hamlets across the country as families traverse miles to find shelter. Instead of focusing on a core group of survivors, the author follows the isolated experiences of a few seemingly disparate individual people, including former FEMA employee Milton, religious expert Samantha, and a stoic young girl known as Kiddo. While their stories only occasionally intersect, those connections effectively reinforce the novel’s core themes of community and solidarity. The narrative iterates the motif of makeshift families and adoptive parents, with multiple characters taking in children after their biological mothers and fathers have died—Hughes’ depiction of these caregivers’ unconditional love in the face of danger is the novel’s most satisfying emotional throughline. Despite the inclusion of strong child characters throughout the book, the prevalence of violence (and rape in particular) makes this a strictly adult read, since no details of the gruesome kills and decomposing corpses are spared. (“Her throat was slashed so deeply her neck was almost split in two. Insects covered the blood that was all around her. She was naked.”) While the individual characters are all vividly realized, the lack of meaningful overlap between their storylines can feel unsatisfying. Additionally, the large time jumps between chapters can make the plot hard to follow, especially when major figures die off-page. Still, the expansive timeline provides impressive scope as the narrative follows these characters as they grow up in an unforgiving environment, never losing hope in the face of despair.
A bleak but moving ode to the power of community.Pub Date: March 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798234024633
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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