An engaging tale with plenty of genre intrigue to satisfy SF fans.
This mind-bending SF novel combines mysticism with thrills.
In the opening pages, Minda Blake, a psychic known as a “remote viewer” for a black ops government contractor, uses her ability to dig up a mysterious gold artifact in the deeply religious Dutch Reformed part of Michigan. Almost immediately afterward, she passes out, later realizing that a colleague wanted the fragment and tried to kill her. After recovering, she resolves to find the golden object and take it to the media, even if her employer will hunt her down and, in the best-case scenario, have her institutionalized. Her quest to recover the artifact leads her to small-town chef Garritt Vanderhoeven, who has his own special abilities following a plane crash and miraculous recovery in the rainforest of Peru. Since the accident, he has seen “flashing, twinkling, golden sparks,” which guide his way, including circling around Minda like “fireflies all around her dark wavy hair” when they meet. Their paths further intersect when Juan Talamantes, a worker at Garritt’s restaurant, is arrested by people claiming to be cops who believe he knows a man who discovered a piece from a UFO. These different narratives collide as Downey offers revelations about the golden artifact and the true history of Earth’s people. The plot intensifies as more is disclosed about Garritt’s family and his break with his religious upbringing. In the middle third of the novel, some of the plot momentum stalls when the tale starts following the interior lives of the expanding cast of characters. The backstory of the black ops government contractor and extended sequences in which Minda learns about the heightened powers provided by the golden artifact occasionally grind the tale to a halt. Despite this, there are enough twists, cliffhanger chapter endings, and rich details about the Dutch Reformed community to set this gripping book apart from similar SF novels.
An engaging tale with plenty of genre intrigue to satisfy SF fans.Pub Date: July 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781953474087
Page Count: 390
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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
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