A deeply emotional, but unsteady first novel.
Others live over a century—Sophia Nolan is expected to die at 27 in Woodsmith’s cautionary sci-fi novel.
The author confronts present-day obsessions with longevity and wellness in a future world where the human life span is almost doubled and the date of death can be foretold. Sophia is born with a life expectancy of 27 years. The story follows her from infancy to adulthood as she and her loved ones contend with the approach of inevitable death. As the pressure grows, family members and others show their true personalities, Sophia faces still more painful truths, and she resolves to try and outlive her PDA—Projected Death Age—despite all expectations. Most of the people in Sophia’s society value the quantity of years lived to a nearly obsessive degree; Sophia has no choice but to appreciate the quality of life and to question the validity of predicting its end. She becomes a sort of rallying figure for a divided society, and the story builds through 27 chapters to a thought-provoking end. Despite showing a future world that has a sprinkling of robots and “thanatometers” attached to people’s wrists (in an apparent nod to Logan’s Run), the author hews closely to a naturalistic account of everyday life among ordinary people. The central conceit of Sophia’s short life expectancy is an intriguing metaphor for terminal illness. Sophia herself is sympathetic and fairly multifaceted, as are most of the characters. The book is marred by some uninspired passages and somewhat awkward “infodump” sections, but the pace and tone are well-served by its deliberate brevity and urgency. Woodsmith seeks to tell a very human and topical science fiction tale that calls into question our expectations of life and medicine, faith and mortality. Although slightly unpolished, the novel has fiber.
A deeply emotional, but unsteady first novel.Pub Date: June 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470068004
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.
Amid the dystopian collapse of the near future, a musician embarks on a quixotic voyage from the shore of Lake Superior.
There’s both a playfulness and a seriousness of purpose to the latest from the Minnesota novelist, a spirit of whimsy that keeps hope flickering even in times of darkest despair. Things have gone dangerously dark along the North Shore, and likely for the country as a whole. A comet is coming that augurs ill, a pandemic has wreaked havoc with the public health, an autocratic despot and raging populism have made books and booksellers all but treasonous. There are corpses floating in the lake from climate change, and there are numerous instances of people swallowing something that kills them; the dead are generally considered seekers of whatever comes next (which has to be better than this) rather than suicides. As narrator Rainy sets the scene, “The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow.” Rainy is a bass player in bar bands, a jack of a variety of trades, and devoted husband to Lark, a bibliophile who runs the local bookstore. Before the collapse of the publishing industry, a cult author had been set to publish a volume with the same title as this novel, and finding one of the few advance copies has been like a holy grail for Lark. Then a copy finds her, courtesy of a fugitive pursued by the powers that be, and whatever tranquility Lark and Rainy had achieved is shattered. Rainy takes to the lake to escape the fugitive’s pursuers and reunite with Lark. He experiences a variety of hardship, challenge, and adventure, yet somehow lives to tell the tale that is this novel.
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162939
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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