Tag: thriller

Creation Lake – Book Review

Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner

Very nearly an excellent book, but…

I’m intrigued from the start with Sadie, our kick-ass narrator. She’s a singular character, I’ll risk a bit of woke chastisement and suggest she felt masculine: decisive, job-focused, practical. Her job has no ethical element to it, she abuses trust for financial gain. A drinking driver, but she tells us she knows how much she can take, and a slovenly eater – warm beer, fast-food, the rubbish piling up around her. She’s very low on empathy, callously uses men for advantage, talks about her body like it’s a weapon. Got a breast enlargement and knows how to use it. Fantastic mercenary women agents have been turning up for a while, from Tomb Raider to Black Doves (mostly male creations I think), but these usually have an compassionate flip-side, perhaps to feed the male fantasy. Sadie is just unbalanced. This makes her interesting. Her narration is straight-forward.

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Violet Black–book review

Violet Black, by Eileen Merriman

This is Merriman doing what she does so well, pacy adventure writing for young adults. Violet Black is a story that begins in the near future of Auckland with two late teens – Violet and Ethan – hospitalised with M-fever, a measles derivative that makes Covid seem like a runny nose. This virus targets teenagers. Ten percent of those infected with M-fever will develop encephalitis. Ninety five percent of those with encephalitis will die. Wow. Kids, this is fiction, OK? Ignore the fact that it is written by a doctor who we generally trust to tell us the truth about medical matters and that the whole scenario sounds pretty convincing at the beginning. If you feel your stress levels going up while reading, take several deep breaths. This nightmarish stuff–pandemics, sinister government organisations, anti-vax terrorism–is all imaginary.

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