A spunky and jubilant love letter to superhero fans.
This YA debut stars two orphans who live in a city that benefits from—yet is somewhat plagued by—superheroes.
Seventeen-year-old Meg Sawyer resides in Lunar City. The metropolis suffers hardly any crime thanks to the Genetically Enhanced SuperVariant Program, which uses a serum to give people superpowers. Four heroes exist at a time, each with one of four abilities—telekinesis, invisibility, speed, and strength—and they serve for two years before giving up the skills. While Lunar City is safe from normal crime, the Supers frequently battle exotic villains, like Doctor Defect, in broad daylight. Both of Meg’s parents died during chaotic super-fights that trashed the city. But Meg is unsinkable. She’s got her GED, works at The Pure Bean cafe, and is best friends with a fellow orphan, 18-year-old Oliver Lee. One night, after super-fighting damages the cafe, Meg hustles to deliver a financial claim to City Hall. She finds Super No. 3 in a dumpster, injured. He says that his time as a hero is almost over, and he’d like to give her money for a fresh start in a safer city. Meg is overjoyed and hopes that Oliver will join her. But before leaving, she stumbles on evidence that the changing of the superhero guard is a more sinister affair than the public realizes. In this novel, Simonds dances gracefully on the line between realism and the many colorful tropes of the superhero genre (including chemical spills and animal bites). Excellent pacing regularly introduces characters who keep the plot fresh and fun, like Juniper Jensen, a “biogenetic engineering assistant” who helped create the Super serum. When Meg sneaks into the Saint Charles’s Academy to discover the identity of one of the Supers, aficionados of the Spider-Man comics and films should be charmed by clever—and nerdy—plot developments. Later twists, some more predictable than others, generate higher stakes for the heroes and Lunar City organically. The author maintains a consistent YA tone, never indulging in over-the-top content that some writers in the genre lean on. The potential sequel has an incredible jumping-off point.
A spunky and jubilant love letter to superhero fans.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 309
Publisher: The Parliament House
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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