A thoughtful, if less than thrilling, novel about what society should be.
Harindranath tells the story of a hero’s quixotic quest to break with his society in this philosophical sci-fi debut.
In 2062, in the country of Utopai, everyone has a guaranteed monthly allowance, a happiness-inducing brain implant, and engrossing virtual reality games to play. Utopai appears to be, for lack of a better word, a utopia. Even so, 50-year-old bookworm Alonso is dissatisfied. He decides to pursue a path of hard work, risk-taking, fame-seeking, and wealth accumulation (things he’s only read about in books), so he rechristens himself “Don Alonso” and disconnects from the artificial-intelligence system that everyone uses. He recruits a reluctant sidekick, Sancho, and they set out to lead lives of self-sufficiency and meaning. They first attempt to invent something and build a business around it, but in Utopai, where AI has reached the level of human intelligence, everything seems to have already been invented, and private corporations no longer exist. Alonso’s strange behavior lands him and Sancho in a mental hospital, where they meet Carl, a fellow patient who explains to them how Utopai got to be the way it is. If Alonso’s dreams are structurally impossible in Utopai, then he seems to have only three choices: give up, escape, or reorganize society under a better model. Harindranath writes in an accessible, if slightly mannered, style. Much of the book is composed of dialogues in which the characters discuss the ideas that underlie the institutions of their world; “We lack meaning in our lives because we are far too dependent on our society, this humongous, unfeeling block of society,” Don Alonso says during one of his long conversations with Carl. “We feel powerless because our hands are tied, because the reality is hidden from us, because we really are powerless.” These intellectual discussions form the novel’s raison d’être, but they come at the expense of a compelling plot and significant character development. The author does address some murky issues of our time, such as many people’s reliance on technology. Still, the novel as a whole doesn’t feel particularly relevant to our present, far-from-utopic moment in history.
A thoughtful, if less than thrilling, novel about what society should be.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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