Engaging characters spearhead a vastly entertaining cross-genre tale.
A devastated kingdom prepares to battle a brutal approaching army in this third installment of Gurgu’s dystopian SF series.
Geo Woodman is the reigning prince of the Silkers kingdom, part of a world that the Black Rains have ravaged. (The Rains turned water into a gel that corroded the flesh of people now called Corrosives.) Geo hopes to bring the city of Torono, which is a veritable “carcass,” back to the flourishing place it once was. But a more pressing issue is the threat of Han the Great, who leads a massive army aimed at Torono. Among his many soldiers are powerful shape-shifting beings—Dreams and the much more vicious Nightmares, which far outnumber the ones in the Silkers kingdom. Geo and others get a taste of the coming battle when invaders raid the city. Meanwhile, Princess Bree, a scientist, looks into the children who’ve been “journeying,” flying (both mentally and, more dangerously, physically) into the pink-clouded sky and well beyond. Gurgu’s series has taken an intriguing route; it began as apocalyptic SF and has gradually incorporated dark fantasy elements. This installment shuffles engaging characters and subplots, from a young man leaving his village and getting caught up with drug dealers to a mysterious sickness showing no signs of slowing down. The narrative threads all intersect in some capacity by the end, with Han’s army remaining an ever-present menace. The author, who excels at crafting gleefully bizarre images, doesn’t disappoint here: there is a colossal stag beetle, Dreams and Nightmares cocoon themselves, and even the general landscape makes an impression (“Morning crept over the ruins’ walls and glass with smudges of pink. It stretched like blood creeping into the night’s darkness”). The gratifying final act offers a worthy resolution with just a hint as to the direction a sequel might take.
Engaging characters spearhead a vastly entertaining cross-genre tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781738659364
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Kult Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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