An auto-centric spacefaring franchise motors on with its curious sense of humor intact.
In Cohen’s SF series installment, a New Jersey widower, who’s partnered with a powerful talking spaceship to protect Earth, faces major life changes that include an alien invasion.
This series began with Saabrina (2015), and it offers a straight-faced approach to a way-out premise: Bob Foxen, a middle-aged Everyman, has taken a sharp turn in his life by becoming a “Sentinel”; he’s charged with secretly guarding the security of an unsuspecting planet Earth and other worlds under the aegis of the mighty United Star System, or USS. Bob tackles this task with his extraordinary artificial intelligence partner, Saabrina—a transdimensional robotic spaceship that looks like a sporty but modest Saab automobile but can defeat an entire space fleet. Saabrina can also create a humanlike holographic projection of herself in various guises and has access to a vast knowledge base. Eight years into their partnership, the duo have survived perils and assignments on Earth and on other USS protectorates. Now Bob’s daughter, Rebecca, is about to get married to a man who has a high command post in the USS, and Saabrina is happily taking part in preparations. Soon, however, a crisis arises involving a powerful group of car-shaped alien robots called Firebirds that resemble the familiar Pontiac vehicles of the same name. When the avaricious Empire of the Greater Noble Houses moves to conquer a disputed border planet, Bob and Saabrina undertake its defense, but the heroes are blindsided by a hostile Firebird on the enemy side. Saabrina is seriously wounded, and Bob requires emergency USS medical treatment. Even if they recuperate, how can they defeat such a formidable foe? And what about Rebecca’s big wedding ceremony?
Cohen’s offbeat narrative is seriocomic (or perhaps serio-cosmic) in tone, alternating between upper-middle-class domestic dramedy and surprisingly sparse space-battle intrigues. A lengthy and vitally important aside may broadside the reader in the middle act, in which a traumatized, offline Saabrina dreams vividly of a human life in surreal, 1980s-ish “Neo York” as a graduate student at Columbia University, trying to defend her dissertation on graphic novels amid a whirl of dates, vampires, werewolves, and anime clichés. AIs aren’t even supposed to be able to dream of electric sheep, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, let alone attend a magic college, so readers may wonder just what’s going on; a few other key points remain unresolved in this installment as well. Other than the car-robots, the novel’s alien characters often feel like escapees from a low-budget SF TV show, including Graustarkian counts and European-type decadent royals. Other pop-culture ingredients and shoutouts reference the comic strip “Peanuts,” the graphic novel Maus, Arthur C. Clarke, Doctor Who, Russian literature, columnist Russell Baker, and Star Trek: “She looks again, farther out, letting the stars stream by. She hears Kirk speak the words: ‘Space, the final frontier.’ She has lived them.” Even with the unanswered questions, this entry remains a comfortable ride for genre fans who’ve settled into the bucket seats of Cohen’s peculiar universe.
An auto-centric spacefaring franchise motors on with its curious sense of humor intact.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 9780998976433
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Pengriffin Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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