A modern twist on a classic time-travel trope that interrogates race, gender, and history in a unique way.
In Haynes’ novel, a contemporary Black woman travels back to the 1860s American South via a computer simulation.
Cory, a young Black computer engineer, gets stuck in a virtual simulation during a system test. The simulation gives her the body of a white man and drops her on the edge of a plantation in Alabama not long before President Lincoln’s election. Keeping her wits about her as she searches for an off-switch that will return her to real life, she convinces the plantation owner, Fairlamb, that she is Henry Martin, a tutor for his young son, Mitchell. This ruse provides her with shelter, food, and income, but Cory can’t help but rage inside over Fairlamb’s oppression of the enslaved people on his land. She can’t speak out, though, for fear of fatal retribution; if she dies in the simulation, what would that mean for the real Cory? Even worse, she finds herself growing close to the family, who believe her to be a white man. Cory begins to question herself: Why does she care for this white, slaveholding family? What is the best way to help the enslaved people on the plantation when speaking out for them only brings more suffering? And why does any of this matter if it’s all just a simulation? Haynes does an excellent job of locating the reader right on an 1860s plantation, using real historical figures to great effect. Putting Cory in the body of a white man provides a unique perspective through which the author can explore Cory’s feelings about race and community. (“I didn’t like being in the body of a nineteenth-century white man.”) A few narrative threads are picked up and then just as quickly dropped (as when the real Henry Martin appears), despite the sense that they should have some narrative importance outside the chapters they’re contained within. Despite this, it’s impossible not to get drawn into Cory’s story and hope for her rescue.
A modern twist on a classic time-travel trope that interrogates race, gender, and history in a unique way.Pub Date: June 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798218906122
Page Count: 274
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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