A rousing adventure novel that marries steampunk aesthetics to the seminal concept of protecting American liberty.
An aimless young man escapes his dead-end town when he meets a badass, time-traveling adventuress.
Well, it’s just about weird enough in America now for us to deserve a timey-wimey, full-barrel adventure novel from professional noodle-bender Clines (Ex-Isle, 2016, etc.) that also teaches a non-ironic lesson in American civics. One night 8-year-old Eli Teague of tiny Sanders, Maine, comes upon a woman decked out in Revolutionary War attire, complete with pistols, driving a souped-up 1929 Model A. He sees her briefly again at age 13, when he discovers her name is Harry. He’s finally drawn fully into her world at the age of 29. Harry Pritchard is a Searcher, a member of a shadowy alliance called The Chain, and can move back and forth through history. She is searching for the literal “American Dream,” a powerful incarnation of the values of the Founding Fathers, who summoned the Egyptian God of Creation to forge their totem—not as weird as it sounds. The American Dream was long protected by creepy murderous guardians called the faceless men, but the Dream was spirited away in the early 1960s. Now Harry and her companions use temporal anomalies called “slick spots” to flit through two centuries of American history. They’re hotly pursued by the faceless men, who now number Eli’s childhood bully among them. On their travels to pursue Harry’s leads, we meet a James Dean who faked his own death to search for the American Dream and the folkloric icon John Henry as well as other curious people who helped shape American history. Clines even throws in a few in-jokes for fun—the "transparent aluminum defense" is funny enough to trigger a spit take. Eli is a fine avatar for the reader but it’s Harry’s epithet-wielding, pistol-packing heroine that will capture hearts.
A rousing adventure novel that marries steampunk aesthetics to the seminal concept of protecting American liberty.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-41833-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.
The past isn’t even past—but the one postmodern fictionalist Levin imagines is stranger than most.
Levin turns in a big, futuristic shaggy dog tale, except that the dog isn’t so shaggy. In fact, it’s a rather tidy, lovable little critter called a Curio, or “cure,” a sort of emotional support animal that lends itself to all kinds of bad treatment. In Levin’s future—or past, that is, since most of the action ranges between the early 1980s and the early 2010s—the technological advances we’ve become used to are absent: There are no iPhones, no internet, no Facebook. You’d think that such lacunae would make people feel happy, but instead strange forms of life have been concocted, with inanimate objects capable of feeling and voicing discontent and pain as well as acquiring some of the traits the humans around them possess. Levin’s hero in this overlong but amusing story is an alienated memoirist with the science-fictional name of Belt Magnet. But then, everyone in this story has an unusual moniker: Lotta Hogg, Jonboat Pellmore-Jason, Blackie Buxman, and so forth. His cure has the name Blank, “short for Kablankey, the name I’d given it, at my mother’s suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze.” By the end of the story, even though Blank is a mass-produced laboratory thing, the reader will care for him/it just as much as Belt does—and will certainly be shocked by the horrible things some of the characters do to the inanimate and lab-born things among them. Says a guy named Triple-J, brightly, “Let’s use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops—some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn’t end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy.” If Levin’s point is that humans are rotten no matter what tools you put in their hands, he proves it again and again.
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54496-2
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that...
Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide.
In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbi-without-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay—and everything else of clay, too. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem—in Wecker’s tale, The Golem—is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up—literally—and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and—shazam!—the jinni (genie) appears. Ahmad is generally ticked off by events, while The Golem is burdened with the “instinct to be of use.” Naturally, their paths cross, the most unnatural of the unnaturalized citizens of Lower Manhattan—and great adventures ensue, for Shaalman is in the wings, as is a shadowy character who means no good when he catches wind of the supernatural powers to be harnessed. Wecker takes the premise and runs with it, and though her story runs on too long for what is in essence a fairy tale, she writes skillfully, nicely evoking the layers of alienness that fall upon strangers in a strange land.
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that magic lamp.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-211083-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
