by Veronica Roth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
A wonderfully complex and nuanced book, perfect for readers who grew up on dystopian YA.
Ten years after a sinister government collapsed, a young woman searches for a girl who was kidnapped by that regime.
For most people, life under the Delegation meant oppressive surveillance by the Insight, a mandatory biotech implant that monitored their every move and rewarded or punished them based on a strict code of conduct. But Sonya Kantor, whose father was an important Delegation official, reveled in perfecting her behavior based on the Delegation’s requirements, even posing for a propaganda poster. When the Delegation is replaced by the Triumverate, a supposedly humane new democracy, Sonya and all the other remaining Delegation loyalists are locked away in the Aperture—a walled-off section of the city where people aren’t locked in cells but don't have much in the way of creature comforts, either. One day, 10 years after the uprising, an old friend comes to find Sonya and offers her a deal from the Triumverate: If she can find a girl who was kidnapped by the Delegation, she'll be allowed to move out of the Aperture and rejoin society. One could imagine a dystopian novel set during the uprising that toppled the Delegation in which someone like Sonya is a villain, righteously imprisoned when a new government is formed. But Roth isn’t interested in easy victories or happily-ever-afters. Instead, Sonya grapples with the inevitable failure of even the most optimistic governments, the risk that exciting and helpful new technologies can be used for evil, and the responsibility she still bears for who she was and what she did during the Delegation’s heyday. The novel manages to be an elegant social commentary without resorting to preachiness, and even the most cynical readers will be as surprised as Sonya when they reach Roth’s big reveals about the depths of the Delegation’s depravity.
A wonderfully complex and nuanced book, perfect for readers who grew up on dystopian YA.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-35-816409-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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by Veronica Roth ; illustrated by Ashley Mackenzie
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen
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by Agustina Bazterrica translated by Sarah Moses ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 4, 2020
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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