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
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
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
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