In an overregulated, stratified future, an idealistic lawyer gets caught up in power schemes between unscrupulous politicians and a crime kingpin manipulating a dysfunctional government.
This Libertarian-tilted, cautionary thriller takes place in a nanny-state West Coast, specifically the metropolis of Bakerton, perched somewhere on the San Andreas fault. After internecine wars and uprisings, society is now rigidly controlled—all in the name of “fairness”—with genetic/psych testing predetermining one’s role in life. Elite but busy classes of “Workers” and “Entrepreneurs” have careers, pay all taxes, and generally make things run while the lumpen majority are largely idle, sports- and media-hypnotized "Privileged Citizens,” not required to work and coddlingly given what they need to get by. A Privileged Citizen can hold a job, but too much ambition or defiance is punishable by law—sometimes brutally. Thus, Privileged Citizens form a borderline-thug class prone to lawlessness. When Bakerton erects a Wall to prevent Privileged Citizens from raiding Worker neighborhoods, Amobo, a military man–turned–crime boss, foments rebellion (in a secret alliance with politicians) to increase his power. A wild card: crusading attorney Nathan Englander, who routinely handles Privileged Citizen complaints and foils a few of Amobo’s acts of terror on camera, paving the way for a political career, his own possible manipulation, and a violent finale. With solid pacing, characterizations, and pathologies, O’Neill’s (Slugger, 2017, etc.) novel largely eschews the hectoring AM radio talk show tone of much politically oriented, speculative fiction from the conservative side. Comparisons to Brave New World (complete with a popular somalike pacification drug) would not be far off the mark, which is high praise. Still, there’s a third-act suggested remedial reading list of Thomas Paine, de Tocqueville, Hamilton, etc. (the Adam Smith–derived title is a point not even a Privileged Citizen could miss), and a cavalry of armed militiamen to the rescue. The Wall element, a tool of repression disguised as a solution, is well-timed for the era of the Donald Trump presidency. Dystopian political sci-fi with a disturbingly persuasive edge.
Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4975-3697-5
Page Count: 454
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious if somewhat meandering addition to one of the more successful zombie franchises.
A reanimated zombie must fill in the pieces of his missing past in this doorstopper sequel to Warm Bodies (2011).
To recap, Marion (The New Hunger, 2015, etc.) penned a clever zom-rom-com in his previous books, set during a zombie apocalypse and starring a hunky young zombie named R. Weirdly, our boy starts to regain his humanity when he falls for Julie, a still-living survivor (after making a snack of her boyfriend, Perry Kelvin, as one does). This first of multiple planned sequels picks up immediately afterward and quickly goes off the rails. In the beginning, R is still the blank slate from the first book. “Whatever past lives return to me and whatever other names they bring, this is the one that matters,” he says. “My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning." The living are settled into an unsteady truce with the dead, their new animations explained by a gimmicky plot device called “the Gleam.” “Every once in a while it just...happens, and the Dead get a little less dead.” Their settlement quickly comes under siege from a corporate militant group called Axiom, while other rumors spread of a religious group called the Fire Church. R, Julie, R’s buddy Marcus, and the rest of their crew escape with the help of—surprise! —Abram Kelvin, the older brother of the boyfriend whose brains R wolfed down. From there, it’s a cross-country journey to a scorched Helena, Montana; on to Detroit, where Julie frees her chained-up, zombified mother; assaulting an Axiom facility in Pittsburgh; and finally, on to New York City to face not the big bad Axiom but the inevitable cliffhanger. We do get the full back story on R’s background, although fans of the character may be disappointed by some pretty manipulative twists. Still, Marion has ambitiously expanded on his original tale, offering a dramatic amount of mythology and worldbuilding to flesh out his murky world.
An ambitious if somewhat meandering addition to one of the more successful zombie franchises.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9971-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Poses the typical challenges to our safe, complacent lives, forcing readers to ask, “What would I do if….”
When a global epidemic spreads to Sydney, Australia, one mother fights to keep her family alive and together in Hickie’s debut thriller.
Loyal wife and mother Hannah becomes obsessed with coverage of the Manba virus, convinced against all reports that it will spread to Sydney. As a cancer survivor, she has some personal experience with struggle and illness, but her paranoia leads to an immaculately kept pantry filled with carefully counted staples and stores. What seems at first to be Hannah’s annoying sense of paranoia and self-righteousness proves to be brilliant planning when the disease virulently attacks her area of Australia. Quarantined together, Hannah's family faces challenges to their safety and questions about the limits of human empathy as they fight not only to survive, but to keep their own relationships intact. There is no shortage of suspense in Hickie’s novel, but on a deep level, it lacks drive. Hannah is complex but a bit too sanctimonious, and the risks she faces do little to paint her in a sympathetic light. There's an effective sense of claustrophobia; once the family goes into quarantine, they have little contact with any other people or any other places, so the reader is trapped with them in their house—and in their roiling emotions. The most wrenching subplot involves a dead neighbor whose little girl is taken in, rather reluctantly, by Hannah’s family.
Poses the typical challenges to our safe, complacent lives, forcing readers to ask, “What would I do if….”Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35545-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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