Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you.
A young girl documents her escape from a flooded and now uninhabitable New York City.
After the progressive decline of the World As It Was—“Storms always came. They took things”—13-year-old Nonie is adjusting to life in what remains of New York, most of the city and its people now gone. Nonie is part of a group of survivors living in a community called Amen in the remnants of the American Museum of Natural History; she handles the routine and confines of life in The World As It Is better than most, as she remembers little of the world’s past freedoms and safety. She also feels a deep connection with the water, so much so that she can sense incoming storms—all except one, the hypercane, a storm that “moved faster than thought and faster than sense.” This finally forces the group to abandon the relative safety of Amen and the purpose they’ve found in documenting the artifacts of the museum as “a duty to the future.” The narrative keeps pace with the sense of urgency created by the hypercane, and Caffall brings the terrifying realities of this near-future to vivid life through expert use of sensory language: “We moved blind and clattering through dark halls, along the balcony of African animals, past the elephants. Only the tip of a single trunk visible above the flood. The stairs were wet…rain pouring in to meet the sea, the slippery marble hard to manage, the sound of breaking glass.” Nonie’s unique account of the survivors’ journey north along the Hudson River—she has both a scientific mind and a sense of wonder—is a celebration of human perseverance at the hands of nature’s awe-inspiring power.
Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250353528
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
Gripping.
An executioner guards her emotions and her heart in this thrilling series opener that returns to the dystopian world of Mafi’s bestselling Shatter Me series.
Twenty-year-old Rosabelle Wolff lives a meager existence, exiled on Ark Island, the site of what remains of The Reestablishment’s totalitarian state. She scrapes by, working as a contract killer in order to keep Clara, her ailing younger sister, alive. Rosabelle’s stoicism is her defense against the invasive technology that feeds The Reestablishment’s ever-watching “omnipotent, synthetic brain.” With her sister’s survival in jeopardy, Rosabelle consents to a mission that sends her after James Anderson. James was 11 when his elder brother led the resistance that overthrew The Reestablishment, which their father cofounded. More than 10 years later, James is determined to do what his brother couldn’t—infiltrate Ark Island, the regime’s “last refuge,” to uncover its secrets. Rosabelle wrestles with her emotions, torn between her duty to her sister, her hatred of the government, and her growing attraction to James. Mafi incorporates surveillance and artificial intelligence into her realistically drawn world that’s filled with political intrigue. Rosabelle’s and James’ alternating first-person narration fills in the backstory for new readers. The balance between the suspense and dramatic action sequences feels cinematic, and the slow-burn romance shimmers beneath the darker, trauma-tinged themes of mental health, sinister applications of biotechnology, and food insecurity. The leads are cued white, and there’s ethnic diversity among the supporting characters.
Gripping. (Dystopian. 14-adult)Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063419001
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Storytide/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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