A visually evocative but uneven tale about the afterlife.
This debut fantasy sees a teenager afforded a cautionary train ride through the circles of hell.
Seventeen-year-old Joshua Holmes regains consciousness on a train platform. He has no memory of how he got there—only a splitting headache and a ticket. When he boards the train, the older woman beside him tells him he’s on “the ride of a lifetime.” The train is taking the dead to their afterlives in heaven and, mostly, hell. Joshua is in limbo—one of the rare few who will wake from near-death experiences and resume their lives only to take the train ride again years later. Joshua’s ticket is his guarantee of safety. Others will try to steal it. Nonetheless, the mysterious conductor encourages him to mix with his fellow passengers. Joshua strikes up friendships with a trans girl and an anorexic social media influencer. And while he cannot understand why his new pals deserve a place in hell, he can’t remember what brought him to his near death. Will he survive his “trip of a lifetime” and learn what he needs to make that life worthwhile? Husvar writes in the third person, past tense, employing a simple but enthusiastic narrative style. The prose is descriptive yet often flawed, one recurring solecism being the use of past-tense verb constructions for the observed present: “Small murmurs erupted as everyone watched people in all-white clothing walked onto the station from other trains that were parked on different platforms.” In addition, the text is littered with odd, mannered dialogue (“ ‘I’m really about to ask for said management honestly,’ Clarice jibbed”) and off-kilter word choices (“came to thought” rather than came to mind). This lack of polish robs the story of pace and impact—which is unfortunate, because conceptually there is much here to like. The train ride is quite wondrous, and the characters exhibit a surprising depth given their circumstances. Although Joshua’s flashbacks come a little late to be truly effective, he cultivates a nuanced view in keeping with the author’s notion of hell as a place people define within themselves. The various circles defy stereotypes, and most of the train’s passengers are shown to have worth. All told, the book evinces a moody, murky imagination perhaps more in keeping with a visual medium. (The story would make an excellent anime series.)
A visually evocative but uneven tale about the afterlife.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63710-202-2
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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