An engaging adventure set in a deftly illustrated future.
A scientist tries to discover the cause of the freak weather event that supposedly killed her mother in this eco–SF series opener.
In 2049, cold weather is a thing of the past and clouds are only found at Earth’s poles. This is a painful development for electromagnetics expert and BASE jumping enthusiast Quinn Buyers, whose passion is the weather. She is not, however, passionate about the man she is about to marry. Mori Eco is a kind, helpful, and organized man—so organized that it’s a little annoying—but Quinn does not want to commit herself to a lifetime of mere compatibility. She calls off the wedding, but the couple still have the reception, which is also meant to be an opportunity to show off Mori’s new business venture—a cloud-dining experience in the Desolation Islands. When a surprise rainstorm hits the cloud ship, Quinn is forced to jump into the water. She’s picked up by the crew of the Prismatic, a recovery vessel, which informs her that all of her reception guests have perished, including her mother, Lise, who has a Nobel Prize in mathematics and recently created a time-travel portal. The crew has a lot of questions for Quinn, not the least of which is the location of her climate model, the G12, which can predict when solar flares may strike and wipe out communications systems across the globe. Quinn manages to leave the Prismatic and immediately sets off on a journey around the world looking for answers, including evidence for the theory that her mother may have used her time-travel portal to escape her fate. In this novel, Lahey’s prose is lush but surprising, describing a deeply imaginative world: Mori “wants her to wear a simulated cloud. Many times, she’s rejected this idea; she’s a scientist, she has a PhD, it took her six years to develop her climate model, she’s not wearing a white, fluffy cloud. But now she’s indebted, so she nods. She’ll wear the cloud dress.” The author’s Earth of the not-too-distant future is an intriguing, alien place, and readers will delight in watching Quinn move through it. There are a few odd choices—like an ill-advised phonetic rendering of an Irish accent—but on the whole, the story is thoroughly engrossing.
An engaging adventure set in a deftly illustrated future.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-872-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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