A vigorous yarn that mixes stout swashbuckling with moody reflection.
A youngster who wants to be a soldier achieves that goal with bloody and troubling results in Taylor’s dystopian novel.
This action-packed story, set in the distant future, posits a post-apocalyptic, low-tech empire of Sagittarius on the Canadian prairie with an astrological religion that requires babies born outside a monthlong window to be sacrificed. Sagittarius is locked in perpetual war with the nation of Scorpio to the north and has enslaved the people of Taurus to the south. Centering the story is Saya, a Sagittarian tween who dreads having to hold to proscribed feminine roles of housekeeping and childbearing and longs to be a soldier. Saya’s gender nonconformity only seems to be accepted in an observatory run by freethinking astronomers. The young narrator’s soldiering wish comes tragically true when marauders, said to be Scorpions, destroy the town, and orphaned Saya is inducted into the Sagittarian army under a new name. Sai becomes a fierce fighter with sword and bow who’s abused by other recruits but gets respect from officers who address Sai by he/him pronouns. Most of the novel follows Sai’s military career, which undermines the protagonist’s vengeance motive. Sai loves slaughtering Scorpion soldiers in gory battle scenes—the Scorpions’ poison-coated swords inflict particularly grisly wounds—but this zealotry wavers in situations involving civilians, including a 3-year-old Taurian boy. Also influencing Sai is Fion, a gay officer whose soul-searching conversations feed Sai’s disaffection. Taylor’s ruminative, queer dystopian fable feels like a mashup of elements of the Hunger Games series, Mulan, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the daily horoscope. The writing is engrossing and punchy—“ ‘Suck it up,’ Fion scolded me with a biting, severe voice. ‘You’re a soldier now’ ”—and the action energetic: “I…lunged at the Scorpion fearlessly, ducked under his swing, and thrust my blade into his gut. I ripped my sword to the side and relished the sight of his frightened eyes dying.” However, the book’s gender-related themes sometimes feel underdeveloped alongside the narrative’s extensive carnage. Still, Sai’s journey makes for a resonant, absorbing read.
A vigorous yarn that mixes stout swashbuckling with moody reflection.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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