Traveling to the future is their only chance to stay together—as long as time doesn’t tear them apart.
“People wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport,” begins Lim’s shimmering debut novel. The year is 1981, time travel is possible, and a flu pandemic has ravaged the globe. Frank and Polly, a young couple from Buffalo, are navigating the world together until Frank gets sick. In an effort to save him, Polly enters into a contract with TimeRaiser, a company that sends healthy people to the future to work in exchange for medical treatment for their infected loved ones. The couple promises to meet in Texas the year Polly is set to arrive, but something unexpected derails their plans. It’s only when Polly reaches her destination—sprawling, crumbling, unknowable—that she realizes the devastating decision she’s made (“it was irreversible, and only comprehensible after it was done”). Told from Polly’s point of view, the novel oscillates between the present and future—a jarring juxtaposition that’s equally touching and heartbreaking. While Polly’s future is unrecognizable, there are a few depressing tenants that remain: all-consuming capitalism, sexual violence, and extreme wealth inequality are a few. The novel’s unsettling tone ensures the reader remains as confused as Polly. Where the United States of America had been, there is now the United States and America. A land divided by borders, wealth, and something far more precious: normalcy. Lim’s writing shines brightest when she’s ruminating on time, memory, and love: “No matter what happens, the past has a permanence. The past is safe,” and “Eventually this white noise of optimism would completely fuzz over her memories of their minutiae: their laughter, musk, tics, gripes, singing, skin.”
A beautiful debut exploring how time, love, and sacrifice are never what they seem to be.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9255-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | TIME TRAVEL | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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
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