Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.
In Unwin’s SF debut, a troubleshooter for a secret, time-traveling agency visits three different eras in pursuit of someone meddling with the American Revolution.
Joad Bevan is a jaded member of the Time Management Agency, a top-secret government group in Washington state whose operatives work to detect and counteract rogue time travelers. Journeying through time and space can be achieved with modest-scale, exotic chemical reactions, discovered in the 1980s, that generate tachyons (faster-than-light particles). The TMA, fortunately, has the resources to prevent any upstart “time vandal” from disrupting the natural, chronological order of things. Joad must pretend that he’s merely doing arcane, cutting-edge scientific research to keep his winemaker wife, Bess, in the dark. Despite the secrecy, the protagonist finds his workplace dreary and rather absurd—existentially, psychologically, and logically. Then a massive tachyon strike on the TMA complex leaves the base shattered, with the rest of the staff cast back centuries to Colonial North America, and Joad finds himself in an altered landscape. He takes an emergency jump back to the early TMA of 1996 and discovers—in addition to a more positive office environment and a potential new love interest—that one of the agency’s own employees has turned against TMA and is meddling with historical events in 1777 Pennsylvania. Joad’s attempted rescue mission, however, opens up a maze of time paradoxes. Over the course of the novel, Unwin seems to have had quite a lot of fun engineering the plot’s Mobius strip twists and turns and philosophizing a bit about the elasticity of time and the universe (and yes, Doctor Who fans, there is a TARDIS joke). The grumbling hero would be the first to admit that a great deal of his story makes little sense in a straightforward way, and his refreshing attitude helps wind the mainspring of an SF subgenre that’s grown a bit lax from overuse. If Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel Timeline had starred as astringent a lead character as Joad, maybe its 2003 movie adaptation would have been better.
Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.Pub Date: April 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-71-537894-1
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
