Lee’s smoothly competent writing can’t save this bland, by-the-numbers race to save the world.
A prion disease originating at an Alaskan pig farm is causing people to lose their memories. One young woman holds the key to a cure.
It’s a cold winter’s day in rural Iowa when 22-year-old Wynter Roth is unceremoniously booted from the compound of apocalyptic cult New Earth as its founder, Magnus Theisen, looks on. Wynter is devastated, but luckily, Julie, her mother’s former best friend, offers her a home beyond New Earth’s formidable gates. Wynter was a small child when her mother brought her and her sister, Jaclyn, to New Earth, and she was never a thoroughly willing convert. Nonetheless, her faith in God has been inevitably shaped by the ravings of Magnus Theisen, a millionaire and self-styled prophet who has convinced his followers that the end is coming with all the fire and fury of a vengeful God behind it. Soon after Wynter leaves New Earth, people start falling ill with an affliction that causes a form of dementia, and society begins a slow, rolling collapse, helped along by cyberattacks by vaguely defined foreign threats. After Julie’s husband, Ken, conveniently an epidemiologist, is called away to help, Jaclyn—who is married to Magnus—shows up with tissue samples and implores Wynter to get them to a veterinarian in Colorado and get her 5-year-old daughter, Truly, out of New Earth. So, Wynter sets off across a chaotic, increasingly deadly landscape where she eventually meets up with Chase Miller, a handsome ex-Marine who offers help. The book’s strongest sequences, interspersed throughout, take place during Wynter’s formative years at New Earth. Wynter narrates, giving us an eye-opening look at how cults groom their faithful masses, and her integration back into the outside world feels realistic. Christian novelist Lee (Firstborn, 2017, etc.) offers a pragmatic, down-to-earth approach to faith, and Magnus is creepy enough to rival anything that prion disease can throw at poor Wynter. However, Lee misses an opportunity to put a unique spin on stale societal-collapse tropes, and Wynter’s travails will barely make seasoned genre readers flinch.
Lee’s smoothly competent writing can’t save this bland, by-the-numbers race to save the world.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9862-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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