An open, imaginative work of YA science fiction.
Human teens attempt to preserve their home on an alien world in Wright’s YA debut.
On the distant moon Sahara, where night lasts 27 hours and is lit by the blue-green glow of a nearby gas giant, human colonists do battle with the chimeras native to this strange world. Rumor has been training to fight them since his mother was killed years ago, but during an overwhelming attack on his settlement, he isn’t able to save his father. Nyx is deaf, though the moon beneath her feet speaks to her in strange ways, encouraging her to abandon her settlement and live among the rebels of the forest. Jude is one of these rebels, seeking peace between the humans and chimeras, which are beings with “great wings and long fingers and mountainous crags of teeth connected to jaws that could crush stars and inhale comets.” Braeden is the son of his settlement’s leader and suspects that the cause of the attacks might have something do with the chimera that his parents imprisoned in their basement. As the enemy prepares for another attack, these four teens will have to find a way to put a stop to the conflict, which will likely end in the annihilation of humans from Sahara’s surface. They only have 27 hours to complete this task, and given the way things have been going, it will be a miracle if any of them survive the long night. Wright writes in a snappy prose that serves the book’s tense action sequences: “The gargoyle launched, clawing the air where he’d just stood. It landed on the other side of him, sliding in the loose gravel as Rumor rolled and came up to a crouch, his blades ready.” The pacing is swift, and the storyline leaps among the perspectives of the four main characters in a way that gradually builds the reader’s understanding of the situation. In addition to its captivating humans-versus-monsters premise, the book features an admirably broad treatment of gender and sexuality—LGBT and asexual characters serve as the norm rather than the exception—in this futuristic world. Readers will come away hoping that further installments are in the works.
An open, imaginative work of YA science fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63375-820-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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