Vicious alien conquest and oppression drive this provocative YA/SF thriller.
Vastly powerful space aliens hijack Earth and abduct and imprison humans.
Following a power outage, our adolescent narrator, Lauren, her younger brother, Matthew, and their mother are among the masses of humanity literally swept up by powerful, godlike space aliens and jailed in rather conveniently available hangars in town. Deadly energy barriers keep people contained, and troublemakers die hideously. Eventually, the Invaders show themselves. The gaunt, robed, elongated humanoids declare that humankind’s endless ravaging of Earth’s environment must end immediately. The planet will be rehabilitated whether they like it or not. Earth’s inhabitants, meanwhile, will suffer an indefinite period of “atonement...and…enlightenment.” Small liberties are soon granted to the prisoners. Ultimately, Lauren finds herself corralled with the other children separated from their families, and she’s trained by a pair of Invaders (one female and kindly, the other male and harsh). The aliens seem to have other ET species working in subservient positions, and as long as Lauren cooperates, she’s permitted access to the Invaders’ impressive technology, which allows for the revival of extinct animals and restoration of Earth as a biodiverse paradise. But cruel mistreatment of humans persists, and Lauren wonders if the Invaders have a more selfish, sinister agenda. Galuppo’s YA debut is akin to The War of the Worldsand not unlike recent bestsellers, like Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave. But rather than spectacular destruction and action, the novel emphasizes stifling confinement and slow, crafty indoctrination. A hostage-style narrative of deprivation, reward systems, and Orwellian mind-conditioning that might have succumbed to tedium and predictability is actually provocative and suspenseful. Invaders are allowed to remain nonhuman enough that their overwhelming menace does not feel merely like a nasty caricature of Homo sapiens’ “green” movements. An open ending and fertile story threads indicate Galuppo has more than a few seedlings for a sequel in the girl-vs-Goliath mode.
Vicious alien conquest and oppression drive this provocative YA/SF thriller.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781632999528
Page Count: 326
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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