An entertaining mix of high-tech showdowns with believable adolescent friendships and romance.
When something goes wrong at a secret military base, world survival depends on a group of Laser Wars-playing teenagers in this debut YA sci-fi novel.
Blackwoods, Wyoming, is the top-secret site of Briggs Air Force Base and Blackwoods Military Research Facility, the most advanced institution of its kind on Earth. For kids like Ethan Tate, 13, whose parents work at the facility, this means “toys years ahead of their time” and impressively well-equipped games of Laser Wars with fortresses in the woods. Unfortunately, his Team Bravo leader, Gen. Turnbull’s son, Austin, is a bully who enjoys taunting Ethan with his own father’s low status as a janitor. Ethan, a scout, often wishes he could be on Delta Team with pretty Annika Pepper, “the best Laser Wars sniper in Blackwoods for three years running.” When, soon after seventh-grade graduation, nearly everyone in town disappears overnight, only a few kids are left to discover what’s happened and how to fix it: Ethan; his best friend, Caleb Warren (Team Bravo’s engineer); Annika; Austin; and Glenn Vaden (the leader of Delta Team). It seems that robots being experimented on at the facility have achieved sentience, resent their treatment, and become bent on world domination. Using the clues and equipment at their disposal, the five teenagers must fight a lengthy, desperate battle and make a last-ditch attempt to save humankind. In his novel, Peek writes an engaging, exciting story that nicely balances technical details of weaponry and combat with good character development. Ethan shows growing leadership that parallels his deepening relationship with Annika, and Austin displays a new side of himself in the face of adversity. The book is well structured, setting up ideas and skills in early chapters that pay benefits later on. Some of these developments feel predictable in the classic, scrappy-bunch-of-misfits genre (a teenager subtrope), but the kids have genuine skills and Peek adds an original spin with the Laser Wars background. Unfortunately, the ending throws a last-minute curveball that’s under-explained, leaving a note of unresolved confusion.
An entertaining mix of high-tech showdowns with believable adolescent friendships and romance.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7357060-0-9
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Pebbyville Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2019
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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