A futuristic tale that’s light on drama and heavy on machinations.
A dark future looms for a dystopian Singapore in this political horror novel.
Perera’s (Golem & Traum, 2018, etc.) book centers on Ben and Toni, a hopeful young couple who live in a bleak version of Singapore and try to keep up a bantering tone about the ruling Party’s increasingly draconian societal restrictions and penalties. Ben is a writer, but Toni is active in the opposition movement seeking to unseat the Party in the upcoming elections, and this introduces the story’s element of political intrigue. The author deepens that facet by taking readers deep inside the nefarious workings of the Party and all of its various ruling cabals. The Party secretly intends to manipulate a series of events in order to cancel the elections. Half of the momentum of the tale’s middle section involves the ever widening circle of evil lurking behind the Party: a sinister transnational corporation, a mysterious figure called The Gewgaw Man, and, ultimately, in one of the book’s crossovers into horror, a supernatural being named Azteroth. All of these players are working gleefully toward a totalitarian state (“It was going to be peachy”), which will be heralded by “The Rising,” a wave of smartphone-infected zombies (confusingly called “smombies”). The Party is thoroughly immoral, racist, anti-Semitic, and corrupt, believing in “price-is-right politicians” (“It is a simple matter of logic,” readers are told in an example of the book’s dry humor, “and it is also true, factual, obvious, manifest, crystal clear, undeniable, explicit, and bordering on a tautology”). The chilling parallels to current authoritarian politics are clear, including some admonishing notes about the monstrous indifference of the majority, who left Singapore (because of the “poppycock, lunacy, idiocy, incompetence, and utter moronic nature of The System”) rather than fight for the country. The author’s decision to end his narrative with two chapters consisting of long blocks of info-dumping is a bit bizarre and gives an already expositional tale a decidedly anticlimactic aftertaste. But the thinly veiled social commentary that propels the story is also its main source of interest.
A futuristic tale that’s light on drama and heavy on machinations.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-923902-4
Page Count: 299
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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