The pleasingly escapist adventures of an ordinary dad and his friendly alien robot supercar; not as campy as it sounds.
In Cohen’s SF novel, a corporate executive becomes a guardian of the planet Earth, assisted by a shape-shifting sentient robot who commonly takes the form of a snazzy Saab car.
Bob Foxen is a middle-aged New Jersey widower, father, and observant Jew whose lifelong career in corporate finance has brought him little personal or professional fulfillment, due to his ethical nature. His old buddy Eddiereveals an amazing secret: He is actually a “Sentinel” for the United Star Systems, ensuring Earth’s safety in a hostile universe. Eddie, needing a break, lets Bob take the wheel for a few days. The wheel in question belongs to Eddie’s partner, a jet-black Saab car, Saabrina. The vehicle is actually a transforming robot and transdimensional spaceship—virtually indestructible, powerfully weaponized, and equipped with a female personality. Bob’s first job for the USS is an alien diplomatic-trade mission. It succeeds (thanks to Bob's MBA training), and Bob earns permanent employment as a Sentinel—but Saabrina has had her AI heart broken before, when a previous Sentinel partner did not survive the perils of the job. In this series opener, the author wisely takes few cues from the fondly remembered but cheesy Knightridertalking-car television show of the 1980s and instead follows the road signs set by the BBC’s long-running Doctor Whoprogram, one of many SF reference points for the novel (like the doctor’s TARDIS craft, Saabrina is bigger on the inside than on the outside, with “epic trunk room”). Cohen’s aliens, imperial military men and aristocratic types, sometimes with purple skin and horns, have a British flavor (“Austin pronounces the name with a deep, authoritative voice, almost Shakespearian in its timbre. The English-like accent helps”). The hero’s ethnic identity provides some avenues of humor, though Cohen never goes the full Mel Brooks route. The action-packed climax is pure Marvel Cinematic Universe (another stated inspiration) spectacle.
The pleasingly escapist adventures of an ordinary dad and his friendly alien robot supercar; not as campy as it sounds.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2015
ISBN: 9781519083111
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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