A twisty alien-invasion actioner that’s front-loaded with emotion.
After aliens in battle armor destroy most of human civilization, a tough adolescent survivor finds hope and surprise allies thanks to her possession of a rare, working cellphone in this YA sci-fi novel.
Planet Earth was looted of most of its water by mysterious “crabs”—aliens (or alien robots) in plasma cannon battle suits resembling oversized crustaceans. In the process, billions of people died. Mankind did figure out ways to kill the crabs, but civilization still crumbled in decisive defeat. Now, in the parched wastelands around Milwaukee, where crabs still occasionally patrol, 16-year-old war orphan Yasmine stoically perseveres, bartering salvaged goods, including weapons, and reclaiming what water that remains from condensation, secret stashes, and even recycled urine. She also secretly maintains her late mother’s cellphone and its archived texts, photos, music, and handy camera by using a solar charger. After she manages an incredible one-on-one victory against a crab, she adjusts to being a member of a hardscrabble colony of fellow survivors. But then her phone starts receiving new messages. A caller named Trey tells Yasmine that he’s being held prisoner in the city by a human faction called the Monoliths—and he needs her help. Orion launches his Dry Earth series with some sci-fi tropes that aren’t exactly groundbreaking, but they do have suitable gravitas. The author spends much of the narrative developing Yasmine’s character as a hardened, adolescent loner who’s slowly acclimating to a makeshift community. Sharp readers may see the story’s big third-act twist coming from blocks away. Still, Orion effectively pours on the action, with Yasmine surviving firefights and collapsing buildings with no injuries—at least, none that are serious enough to keep her from the next battle. The author also tosses some plot twists and engaging concepts into the mayhem that will keep readers engaged. Unlike similar titles in the post-apocalyptic YA subgenre, there’s no romance in this installment—but then, this is only Book 1.
A twisty alien-invasion actioner that’s front-loaded with emotion.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2018
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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