Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.
In a corporate/authoritarian future, a police detective tries to rescue his journalist wife when they are both targeted by a deadly conspiracy to sanction slavery in the United States.
Gurgu opens an SF series based on the potent political premise of a capitalism-yoked, tech-choked Earth of the not-too-distant future embracing slavery as an accepted economic engine. Following eco-collapse, war, and the “Black Crisis” that wrought 80% unemployment, corporations formed their own union to dictate terms most favorable to their survival. In Britain of all places, this notion takes root as institutionalized “servitude.” Whole families with missed debt payments—which encompass almost everyone—can be seized and enslaved. In an America dominated by a monolithic Republican Party, this harsh system is about to be approved under the breathtakingly hypocritical “Freedom Act.” But already, entrepreneurs have broken the law in creating clandestine slave-processing centers (and mass graves). Hard-charging New York City Police Department detective Blake Frye (think Liam Neeson meets Gerard Butler, but tougher) is blissfully married to crusading investigative journalist Amy, whose career derailed when she identified prominent businessman William Wilmot as an underground slave magnate. Wilmot bought her TV network, seeking to dispose of everyone connected to the report. Now, with Amy one of Wilmot’s few surviving enemy-list targets, Frye reluctantly goes to grim, protest-wracked London for a secret rendezvous. It seems even British servitude companies are horrified by the prospect of the lucrative American slave market being monopolized under ruthless Wilmot and want Frye to remove the threat. Upon returning to the “land of the free,” Frye and Amy are imperiled by the corrupt Department of Homeland Customs and Border Security and everyone on Wilmot’s secret payroll. Even with a recursive narrative structure that regularly flashes back to account for how this ordeal came about, the novel keeps the momentum rolling along, and readers will feel chained to what happens next. And lest one wonder how Donald Trump factors into this dystopian vision, Frye ponders that the year 2017 was when everything started going wrong. The author chooses to have Frye afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a trait that supposedly sharpens his deductive skills. But this portrayal also recalls TV’s whimsical, OCD–ridden crime-buster Adrian Monk, a jarring contrast when pyrotechnics and cliffhangers reminiscent of a 007 spectacle break loose.
Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.
In a dystopian near future, art battles back against fear.
Ng’s first two novels—her arresting debut, Everything I Never Told You (2014), and devastating follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—provided an insightful, empathetic perspective on America as it is. Her equally sensitive, nuanced, and vividly drawn latest effort, set in a dystopian near future in which Asian Americans are regarded with scorn and mistrust by the government and their neighbors, offers a frightening portrait of what it might become. The novel’s young protagonist, Bird, was 9 when his mother—without explanation—left him and his father; his father destroyed every sign of her. Now, when Bird is 12, a letter arrives. Because it is addressed to “Bird,” he knows it's from his mother. For three years, he has had to answer to his given name, Noah; repeat that he and his father no longer have anything to do with his mother; try not to attract attention; and endure classmates calling his mother a traitor. None of it makes sense to Bird until his one friend, Sadie, fills him in: His mother, the child of Chinese immigrants, wrote a poem that had improbably become a rallying cry for those protesting PACT—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act—a law that had helped end the Crisis 10 years before, ushering in an era in which violent economic protests had become vanishingly rare, but fear and suspicion, especially for persons of Asian origin, reigned. One of the Pillars of PACT—“Protects children from environments espousing harmful views”—had been the pretext for Sadie’s removal from her parents, who had sought to expose PACT’s cruelties and, Bird begins to understand, had prompted his own mother’s decision to leave. His mother's letter launches him on an odyssey to locate her, to listen and to learn. From the very first page of this thoroughly engrossing and deeply moving novel, Bird’s story takes wing. Taut and terrifying, Ng’s cautionary tale transports us into an American tomorrow that is all too easy to imagine—and persuasively posits that the antidotes to fear and suspicion are empathy and love.
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49254-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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