Although filled with potential—particularly in delivering social commentary—this book ultimately fails to achieve its goal...
A debut novel, the first installment of a trilogy, mixes a diversity of narrative elements—apocalyptic fiction, black comedy, zombie-powered horror, and dystopian fiction.
Living in a region where humans, brainwashed by the government and media, have become slaves to the inane (fashion, fast food, music, the abuse of pharmaceuticals, etc.), sardonic 17-year-old Biff Christen sees the world as it really is. A disillusioned student at the Maximum Security School of Stonewall Valley, Biff yearns to somehow get away from all of the “false perfection”—the tapestry of everyday lies, existential delusions, and rampant superficiality that seems to blanket everyone. Even the trees are plastic. But on the day that the mayor is set to visit the school, Biff’s bus arrives late, resulting in every student passenger being sent to detention. During the mayor’s visit, however, he becomes gravely ill and inadvertently sets off an epidemic where those afflicted become zombies. As civilization crumbles outside of the walls of the detention room, Biff and a group of misfit students must figure out how to survive. One student finally suggests that Biff take action: “You can lead the group in an escape mission from this place. We don’t know what’s going on, the noise is fading and the night will fall soon. I don’t think anyone is going to get us out of here.” While the ambitiousness of this storyline is certainly laudable, Lüersen, by trying to do too much, falls short on all counts. The dystopian element comes off as unfinished and a bit contrived because there is no kind of back story to act as a foundation for the premise. The zombie aspect has the same unpolished feel—a zombie apocalypse erupts, but there is very little speculation about what exactly sparked the outbreak or even a detailed description of the monsters. The walking dead facet simply becomes a cardboard vehicle for the group’s struggles to prevail. Additionally, the characters are largely unlikable and two-dimensional, leading to an emotionally detached read.
Although filled with potential—particularly in delivering social commentary—this book ultimately fails to achieve its goal of blending genres.Pub Date: July 9, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Editora Compactos
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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