A delightful fantasy adventure with a YA spirit, a PG rating, and a rich introduction to Arabian mythology.
A boy in Bangladesh with an unusual heritage finds himself enmeshed in a secret society of supernatural creatures.
Hossain’s debut (Escape from Baghdad!, 2015) was a delicious mashup of pulpy adventure novel and sarcastic war satire, so why not follow it up with a supernatural adventure steeped in Eastern lore? It begins with a boy discovering his true calling. Ten-year-old Indelbed is a smart youngster living under the shadow of his eccentric father, Dr. Kaikobad. Dad keeps his son in the dark about most things, including school and the fate of his mother, whose death certificate says only “Death by Indelbed.” But when Dr. Kaikobad falls into an “occultocephalus coma”—the beginning of much jargon-laced worldbuilding—Indelbed’s family is forced to confess that his mother was a djinn, a supernatural creature in Islamic culture anglicized to “genie.” His older cousin Rais is not impressed: “And you guys all believe in magic? Like Harry Potter-type magic?” he says to another cousin, the Ambassador, who tells them the news. It turns out Indelbed is a half-breed, now the subject of a hunt by a violent splinter group of djinn. After his father’s lawyer, Siyer Dargo Dargoman, sells Indelbed to psychopathic djinn Matteras, he winds up in a “murder pit” with exiled Ifrit Givaras, who has the unenviable task of teaching Indelbed the ways of the djinn and keeping him safe from the carnivorous rock worms that roam the pit. “You came here a frightened little boy,” says Givaras. “I have indeed made you a monster. You said you wanted to survive. This is the price. There are no knights in shining armor in this world, boy. When fighting monsters, what else can you do but become one?” What follows is an epic fantasy adventure with spellcasting duels, steampunk-ish vehicles alongside flying carpets, and a battle of wills between virtual gods and a hero with the heart of a dragon.
A delightful fantasy adventure with a YA spirit, a PG rating, and a rich introduction to Arabian mythology.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944700-06-5
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.
A sequel to The Peripheral (2014), in which bored dilettantes from the future meddle virtually with potential pasts while more responsible people try to ameliorate the damage.
The novel opens, as so many Gibson novels do, with an intelligent, creative young woman accepting a not terribly well-defined job from an enigmatic (possibly sinister) executive involving a piece of cutting-edge technology. In this case, that technology is an emerging AI with origins in top-secret military research who calls herself Eunice. The young woman, Verity Jane, spends only a couple of days with Eunice (via company-issued glasses, phone, and headset) before her new boss, Gavin, gets nervous about Eunice’s potential and starts attempting to monitor every move of the human–AI pair. What Verity does not know is that her present day of 2017, in which a decreased Russian influence on social media led to an unnamed woman who is clearly Hillary Clinton winning the presidency, the U.K. voting to remain in the E.U., and a volatile situation in Turkey threatening to turn nuclear, was deliberately manipulated by someone in 2136 who enjoys creating doomsday scenarios among possible past timelines. It’s up to future law enforcement (who can only contact the timeline via digital communication or virtually controlled mechanical peripherals) to get in touch with Verity and Eunice and recruit them to prevent looming global catastrophe. Given Gibson’s Twitter-stated unhappiness with the timeline in which he currently finds himself, it's hard to know what he's implying here: That outside intervention would have been required to achieve a Hillary Clinton presidency and defeat Brexit? Or that our own vigilance on social media could/should have brought those outcomes about? And why would these two potentially positive occurrences in that timeline instigate an even darker scenario than the one readers are currently experiencing—and also require that intervention to fix it? Have we reached the point of no return in all potential 21st-century timelines, doomed, at least in part, regardless of what political and social choices we make now? (Nor is it ever really explained why Gavin turns so quickly on Verity and Eunice, unless it’s simply to inject the story with urgency and transform it into the author’s favorite plot device, the chase.) This is vintage, or possibly tired, Gibson, filling his usual quest-driven template with updated contemporary or just-past-contemporary politics, technology, and culture.
Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-101-98693-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
An apocalyptic soap opera set in vividly imagined environments.
Two scientists in remote locations must navigate the sudden loss of human life on Earth.
Augustine is one of the world’s top astronomers. In his late 70s, he is completing a final research project, stationed at the Barbeau Observatory in the Arctic Circle, “the landscape that matched his interior.” Having neglected all his loved ones in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, Augie finds himself alone in the polar tundra after refusing to be evacuated with other scientists during a global emergency. Soon after he's left alone, he finds a young girl, Iris, who appears to have been inadvertently left behind. As the two attempt to adjust to life as, very possibly, the last humans on Earth, another story unfolds millions of miles away: the six-person crew of the Aether, a manned mission to Jupiter, is on its way back to Earth after a successful trip to study the giant planet. Sully, the astronaut in charge of communications, must try to figure out why all signals from Earth have suddenly ceased. Like Augie, she has also jettisoned family for science. However, as the parallel narratives unspool, both Augie and Sully find solace in their austere locales and in the relationships they forge with their companions at the edges of the world. Brooks-Dalton (Motorcycles I’ve Loved, 2015) is a writer who loves grand gestures, and she’s at her best when writing about the epic settings that anchor the book, as the arctic and deep space give Brooks-Dalton outlets that match her scope. However, both the plot and the writing itself frequently fall into this same grandiosity: when an apocalypse is the least dramatic part of a novel, one wonders if Brooks-Dalton might have gotten the same amount of punch with less extravagance.
An apocalyptic soap opera set in vividly imagined environments.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9889-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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