A comic and engaging yet didactic look at the mechanisms underlying economies.
In this debut novel, a group of abducted earthlings learns about economics in a satirical SF setting.
Three female earthlings—Evadne Lynn, Flora Neemer, and Millicent Tenor—have been sent to the economic reeducation camp on the tiny, remote moon of Ting. There, they receive hologram lessons from Violet Self, who uses as her textbook The Manual of Basic Economics for the Stupid and Ill-Informed to convert the young women from socialists to capitalists. These lessons take on particular resonance for the prisoners given that they spend most of their energy gathering coconuts for sustenance. They are released before too long but cannot go back to Earth, which has been quarantined due to an outbreak of coronavirus. Instead, they are sent to the larger moon of Kapathund, a socialist society caught in the midst of hyperinflation. Kapathund is the home world of Violet, who meets with the women to explain why the socialist moon isn’t anything how they imagined it to be. With Violet’s help, the group seeks to cure Kapathund of its inflation and learn something about the true nature of capitalism along the way. Petersen’s comic world, rendered in precise prose, brings to mind the work of Douglas Adams. While there is much talk of the underlying theory of economics, Petersen has quite a lot to say about human behavior as well, as here where Violet observes another group of prisoners on Ting: “There was always one person who seemed...not smarter or more industrious, not even more prone to capitalism. But there was usually one person who was unhappier than the other two. More unfulfilled, more driven…it was usually a feeling of frustration, rather than optimism, that pushed people forward.” The book’s message is decidedly pro-capitalist, though its definition of capitalism is a bit more nuanced than the term generally used in American political debates. The story does not have much of an emotional dimension—the cartoonish characters primarily exist to represent various (and often misinformed) ideological positions—but the novel is short enough to mostly satisfy as a satire.
A comic and engaging yet didactic look at the mechanisms underlying economies.Pub Date: July 18, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
