A bleak but intermittently humorous psychological novel with an engaging young female arsonist at its center.
A wildly eclectic SF novel set in futuristic San Francisco from Richardson.
Richardson’s vision of San Francisco in the year 2049 is not entirely unrecognizable. The internet is outlawed, and the police force has been partially robotized; yet people are still free to enjoy drunken reveling and general hedonism. The protagonist, Malibu Makimura, is a 19-year-old movie buff who attempts to make a living drawing caricatures at a women-only nightclub. Malibu has suffered from “suicidal ideation” in the past. By 2049, however, her life has improved (she’s no longer homeless, for one), although the earning potential is limited in her field of work. At the nightclub, she arouses the interest of a mysterious woman named Luciana, who some believe is a witch. She keeps a servant nicknamed Max, who resembles the character Max from 1950’s Sunset Boulevard. She also has enough money to pay certain people to do certain odd jobs for her. And, for some reason, she wants Malibu to burn down local cottages, sometimes with the residents still inside. Why cottages? Malibu gets an innate feeling that certain cottages need to be destroyed. The lives of these cottages “had run their course and they were begging to die.” At least that’s what the voices in her head tell her. It helps that Luciana will reward her handsomely for the service. But why cottages? That’s the novel‘s central mystery. That certain structures deserve a fiery death (at least in Malibu’s mind) also creates some darkly humorous undertones. At one point an inexplicable thought surfaces in Malibu’s head: “Yes, it wants to die,” says a voice in her head as she examines a cottage. Some aspects of Malibu’s life are less than inviting. Her father’s history with LSD is detailed, although this backstory proves to be an undramatic dead end. Likewise, a flashback relating to Malibu’s stay in a mental health facility is a detour that adds little substance to the narrative. This odd, fire-starting protagonist will keep the reader guessing throughout the novel.
A bleak but intermittently humorous psychological novel with an engaging young female arsonist at its center.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9784824151940
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Next Chapter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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