03/19/2018
One-dimensional characters and offensive clichés mar DiLouie’s (Suffer the Children) disappointing chronicle of rising unrest between “normal” people and a group of disabled children set in Huntsville, Ga., in 1984. In 1968, an incurable sexually transmitted disease caused physical malformations in numerous babies. Some cases were fatal, and the survivors became known as “the plague generation.” Fourteen years later, those children live in the Home; they have been rejected by their parents, mistreated by their caregivers, and shunned by society. Some of the children begin manifesting powers, such as mind control, that could help them take down the “normals” and gain their freedom. After Enoch, a gentle boy, is killed for a crime he didn’t commit, Brain, a caricature of an autistic savant, decides that war is imminent and gathers the children to fight. Inevitably, the government seeks to use the children and their burgeoning powers for its own nefarious purposes. The well-trod tropes of oppression and uprising don’t take on any new life here, and the linkage of disability, superability, and inhumanity is tiresome and cruel, especially when children are the focus. Any readers who make it through the considerable scenes of carnage likely won’t be satisfied by the pat conclusion. Agent: David Fugate, LaunchBooks Literary. (July)
For two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s best science fiction & fantasy books. What’s on your to-read list from this month’s new releases?
What new books are you picking up today?
Craig DeLouie’s new novel One of Us, out now from Orbit Books, is a dark fantasy tale that plays out against the backdrop of a plague-changed Huntsville, Georgia in 1984. Today. the author joins us to talk about how the novel fits into the tradition of Southern Gothic, and provides you with a reading list […]
As has become our tradition, we’re looking ahead to the next year of new science fiction and fantasy books—with the help of the editors and publishers responsible for bringing them to our shelves each and every week. Here are 95 new books they can’t wait for you to read (and that’s just the tip of […]