A grim and unrelenting tale in the best traditions of the dystopian genre.
A debut novel sees a teenager learn to survive in a post-apocalyptic world rife with civil breakdowns and religious mania.
Sixteen-year-old Seraphina Donner lives in Roslyn, a small town close to Seattle. Sera’s mom has discovered religion. She is making Sera and her twin brother, David, attend a church wedding at the very time when, tragically, an earthquake destroys the building. Sera’s mother vanishes in a heavenly shaft of light. Sera and David survive, but their troubles are just beginning. Yellowstone has erupted, releasing enough ash to bring about a volcanic winter. Seattle is gone, dropped into the ocean. The people of Roslyn are left to fend for themselves. Sera’s grandfather is the town sheriff but not even he can keep order with food running out. Factions emerge. The Spathi, one group, features religious fanatics. The Skaggs, another, wants to cull the weak and the sick. As this would include David—who was born with dwarfism—Sera is forced to cast aside her abhorrence of guns. Instead, she finds a place in her grandfather’s citizen army, fighting both for survival and to retain her humanity. While David is being prickly, Sera has developed feelings for Micah Abrams, a former school bully who once made her brother’s life miserable. Where do her allegiances lie? And when humanitarian aid comes by way of a foreign military power, will it be the town’s salvation or the beginning of something far worse? In this gritty tale, Leonhard writes in the first person, past tense and paints a bleak picture of how even a small, tight-knit community might fall apart at the end of days. The nature of the catastrophe—a genuine scientific possibility rather than zombies or the like—adds a sobering dose of realism, as does the author’s commitment to having characters stay true to their natures. The plot is confrontational; the prose and dialogue are practical, as befits the story being told. Events unfold with a sense of inevitability (though with a few surprises), gaining momentum as they play out. Unfortunately, this first volume of a trilogy lacks a self-contained ending. Thus, readers will be left unsatisfied and a bit puzzled by the religious motif that comes increasingly to the fore.
A grim and unrelenting tale in the best traditions of the dystopian genre.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9993922-3-2
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Kc Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
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
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