An ambitious story of survival that doesn’t always click, but is frequently thrilling.
Two men on a hunting trip encounter a civil war.
Heller’s novel follows Jess and Storey, two friends in Maine, as their annual hunting trip turns calamitous. Early on, Heller references a bridge being out and a way forward blocked. The exact nature of the catastrophe isn’t revealed until partway through, though there are some hints. “All summer the entire state had been convulsed with secession mania,” Heller writes. He describes the situation Jess and Storey are in as being “in the wake of a rolling catastrophe,” with all the momentum that implies. The duo doesn’t encounter another living person until a significant part of the book has passed—and once they do, their situation becomes even more unsettling, as it seems they’re in a war zone with little sense of who’s fighting, and on what side. (The way this escalates allows for a rare moment of gallows humor when Storey says, “The helicopters suggest to me it’s not just a Maine thing.”) The two men find a girl, Collie, who’s become separated from her family, giving the second half a little more structure. Jess and Storey’s journey across an uncertain landscape is interspersed with Jess’ thoughts on his now-defunct marriage and his long friendship with Storey. Heller ably captures the white-knuckle momentum as the two men try to stay alive—bringing this book closer in tone to James Dickey’s WWII–era thriller To the White Sea than to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But that choice also makes the speculative elements feel disconnected from the story of the long friendship at this novel’s heart; it’s not hard to imagine much of the same action occurring in the wake of a natural disaster.
An ambitious story of survival that doesn’t always click, but is frequently thrilling.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801628
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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