An ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of disaster.
A pensive, dystopian Western set in the wake of a devastating pandemic stars a reluctant Buddhist hero with an ability to talk to animals.
In 2048, 52-year-old Will Collins is one of the oldest surviving members of a human society that consists mostly of those 30 and under. Living as a hermit for a year when Disease X struck, he got sick but didn't die. Now the sole caretaker of the Colorado Buddhist community where he has spent decades, he receives a message from California-based scientist Lars, father of his old flame Eva, who, Will has been told, died when the pandemic spread 14 years earlier. Lars instructs him to go to a local veterinarian and get an ampoule, which may contain an antidote, implanted in his body, and then make his way to the Sovereign Republic of California. Will calls together his two best friends, the raven Peau and the cat Casse, and uses a team of mules to pull an old truck across the deserted roads, pursued by the vicious Flynn and his militia. Along the way, he reluctantly assumes custody of bright, mouthy 14-year-old orphan Sophie, who is at risk of being forced into prostitution. Groner is at his best in describing the changed landscape, where passenger pigeons and bison have returned in full force and mutant crocodiles make river crossings dangerous, and the many settlements his little troupe encounters, some welcoming and others very much not. The novel sometimes bogs down in discussions of religion, philosophy, and the history of the series of pandemics that led the world into its present situation, and its final chapters are loaded with unlikely twists. But as long as the narrator is on the road, his exploits and observations provide an engaging window into a strange new world.
An ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of disaster.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781954118423
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.
As the world dies, the remnants of the patriarchy and their minions keep right on terrorizing the weak.
Caustically original in the same fashion as her chilling Tender Is the Flesh (2020), Bazterrica’s latest devises an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe. The most palpable tragedy is that no matter how the world dies, women always seem to end up with the same sorry fortune. The story is set in an unknown wasteland where all the animals on Earth have perished, with callouts to a mysterious, poisonous haze and a collapsed world. Our narrator is a young woman relegated to sheltering in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, an isolated, fundamentalist order subservient to an unseen, deity-like “He,” and divided into strict castes. Among these are the Enlightened, kept isolated from the rest of the order behind a mysterious black door; the Chosen, divine and devoted prophets who are ritually mutilated; and the servants marked by contamination, who sit just below the narrator’s caste, the unworthy young women. The story is a little tough to follow due to the narrator’s fragmented memory, not to mention lots of interruptions from the old ultraviolence and body horror. Although men are banned from the cloistered stronghold, it’s a relentlessly sadistic and violent society ruled by the Superior Sister, enforcer of His will and the instrument of punishment up to and including torture and death. The narrator is already mourning Helena, a spirited iconoclast who couldn’t survive under such oppression, when a new arrival named Lucía sparks fresh hope that may prove as fruitless as everything else in this bleak testament to suffering. As a subversion of expectations and an indictment of unchecked power, it’s unflinching and provocative, but readers expecting a satisfying denouement may be left wanting.
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051887
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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