A noodle-bending literary sci-fi novel that puts its hero in the box with Schrödinger’s cat.
An underground comic creator reveals the unbelievably true origin story of her most famous creation, Sputnik Chick, the girl with no past.
In this arresting debut novel, Favro (The Proxy Bride, 2012) has crafted a delightful, timey-wimey gem that manages to temper its phantasmagorical imagery with the authentic pain of losing everything that one loves. The book’s protagonist is Debbie Reynolds Biondi, a pill-popping, hard-drinking cartoonist looking down the barrel of middle age even as her punky comic-book heroine continues to surge in popularity. But to keep her gig, Debbie is under pressure from her publisher and fans to reveal the origins of her graphic doppelgänger. That’s when the story comes off the ground like a flying car as Debbie reveals how she grew up in an alternate reality vastly removed from this one. In Debbie’s universe, dubbed “Atomic Mean Time,” when Robert Oppenheimer split the atom, it shattered time, creating a fractured spectrum of alternate realities. Debbie’s adolescence was spent terrified under the very real threat of nuclear war as America and Russia increased their nuclear arsenals in droves in a cold war that never ended. Yet there are also those mundane but unforgettable moments of adolescence, too, including time with friends and Debbie’s romance with handsome neighbor John Kendal. But again and again, Debbie encounters a mysterious time traveler she dubs “The Trespasser,” who warns of her inevitable fate as the sole person with the ability to bring time’s impossible divisions to an end, albeit at unthinkable personal cost. Favro walks an incredible narrative tightrope here, balancing present-day Debbie’s sad, inebriated reality with Atomic Mean Time Debbie’s frightening world of duck-and-cover exercises, DNA–enhanced “twisties,” and imminent nuclear threats. “I’ve always felt that The Girl With No Past was a revenge tragedy at heart,” a lover tells her. “There’s a darkness at its core. That’s what makes it so interesting.”
A noodle-bending literary sci-fi novel that puts its hero in the box with Schrödinger’s cat.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77041-341-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Imperfect, but well constructed and engrossing nonetheless.
Cerúlia recovers from her wounds and decides it’s finally time to take back her throne in Kozloff’s (The Queen of Raiders, 2020, etc.) penultimate Nine Realms novel.
Badly burned and laid up in a Healing Center, Cerúlia is losing faith in herself. She misses the various friends she’s made along her journey, misses her home, and resents her limitations as she heals from injuries sustained in the previous novel. In the past, her magical “Talent” for talking to animals has helped her make friends with local creatures, but she’s worried that something has happened to her ability and fears using it. As she slowly recuperates and learns from the fellow residents in the healing center, Cerúlia comes to understand that she must face her responsibility to her people and find a way to become the Queen of Weirandale. To that end, she returns home to her nation’s capital, Cascada, only to discover that her long-lost foster sister, Percia, is about to marry the kindly son of the maniacal and power-hungry Regent Matwyck, the very person keeping Cerúlia from her throne. Reunited with her beloved foster family, Cerúlia decides it is time to stop hiding under aliases and disguises. But with no army to support her, how is she supposed to save herself from Matwyck’s clutches? And now that she’s seen more of the world and understands the lives of regular people, does she even believe in the idea of monarchy at all? Kozloff finally brings the action back to Weirandale in a compelling setup to the last novel in her series. Like Book 2, this one struggles a bit with standing on its own, but Kozloff uses these pages to make Cerúlia a more complex and compelling character. Threads following other characters from other nations are easy to follow and add dimension to the world, but as of now they still feel a bit too detached from the main plotline.
Imperfect, but well constructed and engrossing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-16866-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
An engrossing and fast-paced read that doesn’t hit the mark it aims for.
The relationship between a young debtor and the trillionaire who owns him serves as a parable for the ills of capitalism.
Debut novelist Szpara imagines an only slightly more dystopian United States than the one that exists today, in which the wealth gap has grown so large that the country is more or less split into trillionaires and debtors. Debtors inherit their family's debt, increasing it exponentially over time. To pay it off, many sign up to become slaves for a predetermined amount of time, with the “choice” to inject a drug called Dociline that turns them into a kind of blissful zombie who has no memory, pain, or agency for the duration of their term. The drug is supposed to wear off within two weeks, but when Elisha Wilder’s mother returned from her debt-paying term, it never did, leaving her docile indefinitely. To resolve the rest of his family’s debt, Elisha becomes a Docile to none other than Alex Bishop, the CEO of the company that manufactures Dociline. He invokes his right to refuse the drug, one of the only Dociles ever to do so. Alex enacts a horrifying period of brainwashing in order to modify Elisha’s behavior to mimic that of an “on-med.” The resulting relationship between them is disturbing. As Alex wakes up to his complicity in a broken system—“I am Dr. Frankenstein and I’ve fallen in love with my own monster”—he becomes more sympathetic, for better or worse. As Elisha suffers not only brainwashing, rape, and abuse, but the recovery that must come after, his love for—fixation with, dependence on—Alex poses interesting questions about consent: “Being my own person hurts too much….Why should an opportunity hurt so much?” However, despite excellent pacing and a gripping narrative, Szpara fails to address the history of slavery in America—a history that is race-based and continues to shape the nation. This is a story with fully realized queer characters that is unafraid to ask complicated questions; as a parable, it functions well. But without addressing this important aspect of the nation and economic structures within which it takes place, it cannot succeed in its takedown of oppressive systems.
An engrossing and fast-paced read that doesn’t hit the mark it aims for.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21615-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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