Book Review: City Under the City by Dan Yaccarino

City Under the City

by Dan Yaccarino (jP Yaccarino)

 

This brand-new children’s picture book felt like a throwback to my own childhood. The artistic style of this one captured the tone and feel of a book published in the late 1960s or early 1970s. This is “dystopian fiction” for children.

 

in City Under the City, Bix is a child in a futuristic city where the humans are all helped and watched by a collection of floating giant eyes…who provide all that the human beings need, but discourage individuality and actual “thinking”. Bix is a precocious and stubborn little kid, who resists the conformity that the Eyes impress upon everyone else.

 

When a friendly mouse shows Bix the way to a hole to escape the “perfect” city they live him, Bix follows, and discovers an amazing old city hidden beneath the surface of the modern high-tech futuristic reality everyone else simply accepts. There, he discovers a massive collection of pre-Eye books in a library and learns to think clearly on his own.

 

For a simple children’s story, this is actually a template for resisting authoritarianism and dogma, as Bix brings his new-found knowledge back to his family and launches as a resistance movement against the all-seeing Eyes. I enjoyed this on all the levels it was presented, but especially the cute artistic style, that reminded me of watching The Jetsons as a kid.

 

( official Dan Yaccarino web site )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Deal With the Devil by Kit Rocha

Deal With the Devil
by Kit Rocha (Rocha)

Librarians are sometimes called superheroes, Deal With the Devil answers the question: What if literal superheroes were librarians? Set in post-apocalyptic America, this first book in the “Mercenary Librarians” series focuses on two teams of highly augmented people: three women using their skills to bring supplies and books to regular people in Atlanta, and four men who just went AWOL from corporate military.

 

The men are dying as their implants degrade and the one person who can fix them has been kidnapped. To free her, they must capture the leader of the librarians, alive. One of the men knows the secret location of a Library of Congress backup collection and there’s no better bait for the librarians than that. But once they hit the road together and start fighting for their lives, the two groups start to inconveniently care about each other.

 

The primary genre here is science fiction, but erotic romance elements are a strong second. Though the characters are a bit archetypal, I found them all endearing in their own ways with satisfying handling of military SF and romance tropes. Just be sure you’re ready for lots of violence, sex, and coping with trauma.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Burn For Me by Ilona Andrews.)

 

( official Mercenary Librarians page on the official Kit Rocha web site )

 

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

The Memory Police
by Yoko Ogawa

This dystopian book uses magical realism to turn metaphorical examples into actual physical changes the characters must endure. The Memory Police periodically announce something that is to disappear and be forgotten: birds, flowers, photographs, ribbons, stamps, green beans, etc. After an item has been “disappeared” the general population immediately forgets about its use and its characteristics. The few people who are able to remember things are considered dangerous, forced into hiding before the Memory Police can capture and murder them. The disappearance of things and people then losing awareness about what they were forgetting was a powerful symbol of how we need to stay aware of things happening in our world that need to be addressed, rather than passively accepting injustices and dangerous changes.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, or The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.]

[ publisher’s official The Memory Police web page ] | [ Wikipedia page for Yoko Ogawa ]

Recommended by Jodi R.
Anderson and Bethany Branch Libraries

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

DVD Review: Fast Color

Fast Color
(DVD Fast)

I really had no idea what to expect from this quirky little film, and found myself pleasantly surprised.

 

Fast Color tells the story of Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a young African-American woman on the run and being pursued by both the government and scientists who apparently want to study her. Within the first 15 minutes of the film, we are shown that she has special meta-human abilities, which she doesn’t seem to be able to control, but which can be catastrophically dangerous to those around her.

Ruth is traveling by herself to the midwest, in a dystopian near-future which is suffering from a massive drought. When she finally reaches the remote farmstead where her surviving family live, the reunion isn’t entirely amenable. Ruth’s mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) is raising Ruth’s own daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney), after Ruth lost control of her powers, succumbed to addictions, and ran away years ago.

Though this film has science fiction or paranormal elements, at its heart it is a character study, of flawed but emotional people trying to survive and not hurt anyone else. The three main women of the cast do a phenomenal job, and there are excellent supporting performances by David Strathairn as the local sheriff and Christopher Denham as an overly enthusiastic scientist. But, Raw as Ruth and Toussaint as Bo really hold the whole film together.

Don’t go into this one expecting an action-filled SF drama — this one’s a little more quiet, but it’s worth the viewing!

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!