A fervent look at a world that mirrors our own but fails to fully reflect it.
In an alternative present in which Al Gore won the 2000 election, Maddie Ryan comes to her own radical awakening on the Houston streets as an accidental member of a riotous people’s uprising.
The year is 2020. The war on terror has been replaced with the war on climate change, and most aspects of daily life must navigate the labyrinthine Bureau of Carbon Regulation. Maddie Ryan is a white woman in her mid-20s, newly divorced, and teaching at a predominantly Black school in Houston whose students seem to loathe her. When she meets Fish—“a soft, six-foot-two giant” with “a wild red beard, mad-scientist hair”—she is first attracted to him only because he is the polar opposite of her Bible-thumping, sexually conflicted ex. When Fish buys a derelict warehouse in Houston’s historically Black Eighth Ward with the aim of creating “an anarcho-communist creative space,” however, Maddie realizes a relationship with him comes with other benefits. In the Lab, Maddie meets Red (xe/xim) and Gestas (he/him), who together form the guitar-and-drum punk duo Bunny Bloodlust. Gestas, a home-incarcerated carbon felon whose gender presentation involves both a beard and “a baby-pink, pleated, A-line skirt,” fascinates Maddie, but Red, who is “tall and laconic,” with “sweat-slicked black hair falling across xir eyes,” makes her “heart fly off in wild, syncopated rhythms” from the first. In spite of her “queer-hating, strict Catholic” upbringing, Maddie embraces the world that opens to her at the Lab, wins over Red and Gestas with her church youth group–earned guitar chops, joins Bunny Bloodlust, and begins a political awakening guided by Gestas’ extensive library of leftist theory. Then she finds a third and final notice of eviction from the city in Fish’s mailbox. Faced with the dissolution of her new world, Maddie joins the ongoing effort to Save the Eighth and quickly becomes part of a movement with bigger dreams and far more drastic consequences than she could have imagined. This fierce, frenetic, and intensely impassioned novel takes a deep dive into the damage neoliberal thinking wreaks on marginalized communities; however, it also consistently prioritizes the identity politics of its multiply marginalized characters over the nuance of complex, unpredictable, fully human individuals capable of speaking to the reader’s heart rather than to the better angels of our ideologies.
A fervent look at a world that mirrors our own but fails to fully reflect it.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781646142668
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Levine Querido
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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