A spirited and richly-drawn SF novel grappling with climate change and policing.
An impulsive young cop in a fragile future uncovers a plot that could undo her civilization in Corvi’s dystopian novel, the first in a series.
Two centuries after a massive, climate-driven drop in the population, a new state has emerged from the wastes of North America, one founded on the principles of preventing any further calamity. Based in the city of Trenton, in what was once the state of New Jersey, the North American Union is a federation of collectivist agricultural twps (pronounced “toops”) committed to maintaining ecology-conscious policies and stamping out any non-ecological ideas before they can take root. This latter task is the purview of the militarized twple (citizens) of Twp EEE township, who serve as a de facto police force for the entire Union. This group includes 24-year-old Lani Maxwell, an EEE adoptee with a quick temper and a problem with authority. For the last year and a half, Lani has been forced to work a data-entry job as punishment for accidentally killing a child while on a mission; if her attitude doesn’t change, her probation panel might ban her from police work for life. Lani bristles at these rules even as she understands their utility: “If Lani and her fellows failed in their duties, the Bad Days might well come again, and a second such catastrophe would likely end with everybody dead. Everybody. Lani knew all this and believed it. She also knew that she herself was falling short. What she couldn’t believe was that her failure was her own fault.” She decides the way back into active police work is…through more police work. The kind that will earn her plaudits from her review committee. She takes it upon herself to bring down a “by-God bad guy,” though to do so she will have to violate several EEE rules. Getting caught would be bad enough, but what will Lani do when she uncovers a conspiracy that could shake the Union to its very foundations?
Corvi’s dystopia is a mix of intriguing new ideas (the townships, which are more like tribes than fixed geographic areas, have collective rights, but the individuals within them have none) and conventional ones (despite the fact that race has been mixed out of existence, all of the “police” officers seem to have Irish last names). The book is essentially a cop movie set in a future communist ecotopia, a genre blend that the author handles with humor and imagination, as here when explaining why the EEE offices always smell like passion fruit: “Union gardeners had an informal rule, ‘don’t plant anything you can’t eat,’ so decades earlier, the twp groundskeepers had started passion fruit all around the building, and the vines had owned the exterior ever since.” Though it is perhaps unfair to ascribe contemporary norms to a future society, Lani’s petulance and angst cause her to read a bit younger than 24, which gives the book a slightly YA flavor. Even so, the world is inventive enough, and Corvi’s plot intriguing enough, to quickly draw readers in—and leave them wondering where the series will go next.
A spirited and richly-drawn SF novel grappling with climate change and policing.Pub Date: April 20, 2023
ISBN: 9798987561102
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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