Earnest but heavy-handed.
A company-town dystopia laced with a climate change message.
Set in an unspecified future time, this novel follows 12-year-old Erie, who was named after one of the two Great Lakes that hasn’t dried up yet; her 16-year-old sister, Hurona, was named after the other. Erie works in the branches of the lockwood trees that surround her town of Prine. The fireproof, human-invented lockwood, planted after the devastating Arborklept fire, grows so quickly that each morning, Prine’s younger kids cut away top branches to let the sun in and harvest the pods the tree produces. Each week, FOLROY company trucks from the wealthy city of Petrichor pick up the pods and pulp, paying the townspeople a pittance. The grim lives of Prine’s residents are well described, but readers will wonder why Erie dreads growing too big to work in the tree; it’s not explained why that’s preferable to being safer on the ground, where Hurona works. After Hurona and Erie discover something sinister about the lockwood, they smuggle themselves to Petrichor to find the scientist who developed it. At least that’s Erie’s intent; the one surprising plot twist is what Hurona’s actual mission is. Erie’s thoughts often interrupt the narrative flow with strained metaphoric connections and ultimately come across as telling readers rather than letting them figure things out for themselves. Erie and Hurona are White, and Hurona is queer; the supporting cast is diverse in race and sexuality.
Earnest but heavy-handed. (Dystopian. 12-14)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780316449120
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Rushed worldbuilding and romance by peer pressure undercut any excitement the occasional battle might engender.
What could have been an interesting exploration of the conflict between science and magic instead devolves into a choice based simply on who has the bigger bombs.
Sixteen-year-old Glenn is a genius computer engineer torn between the desire to travel into deep space and the need to care for her increasingly unstable father. Perhaps it’s this tantalizing beginning that creates such disjunction once this tale turns out to be just one more story of a chosen girl with an inborn destiny. It seems that the Rift that destroyed so much of Earth in the year 2023 wasn’t a natural phenomenon after all. Instead, deep in the Rift lies a magical land, the Magisterium. There, quelle surprise, Glenn learns she has a dark magical heritage. The land calls out for a savior, but whom can Glenn trust? While she deals with her own developing magical powers and the possible betrayal of Kevin, her best friend and erstwhile beau, Glenn fights in a sudden and fairly inexplicable war that has descended upon the Magisterium. In fantasyland, Glenn’s apparently genius-level skills at engineering lie undeveloped and unmentioned. Even her name changes, the “Glenn” (perhaps evoking astronaut John Glenn) replaced with the over-the-top fairy-tale name “Glennora Amantine.” “You’re a scientist,” Kevin tells Glenn. “Tell me you don’t want to understand....” Would that she did, but there’s no thoughtful consideration here.
Rushed worldbuilding and romance by peer pressure undercut any excitement the occasional battle might engender. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-29018-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Regency romances can combine well with science fiction (Lois McMaster Bujold’s accessible adult novel A Civil Campaign...
Regency romance sits uneasily in a dystopian throwback future.
Poor little rich girl Madeline Landry wants to go to university before marrying and inheriting one of America’s most important estates. Madeline’s world is an odd amalgam of romantic notions of history and dark, postwar future. The western half of the United States fell years ago to “China and her allies,” exotic faceless caricatures who smuggle “plum wine, opium, and jade” and who don’t fight like “civilized armies” but are “brutal” when they “swarm.” Meanwhile, the gentry’s entire society rests on its enslavement of the Rootless, a diseased underclass responsible for maintaining the nuclear power invented by Madeline’s own ancestor. From within the cozy confines of her silken prison, Madeline realizes that forcing children to dispose of spent uranium while providing only enough medical care for them to stay fertile is a little gauche. Along with a few interestingly complex secondary characters, Madeline learns about the caricatured evil underlying her luxuries. Will she be able to assuage her conscience by merely scattering largesse to the populace out of a sense of noblesse oblige, or will she be forced to make any actual sacrifices?
Regency romances can combine well with science fiction (Lois McMaster Bujold’s accessible adult novel A Civil Campaign (1999) does so brilliantly), but this awkward merger of the two will convince few. (Science fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3948-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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