Booklist Reviews

Avi Hirsch is a journalist addicted to danger, but his work catches up with him when he loses a leg in a bombing. While he recovers, he takes care of his eerily clairvoyant daughter Emmaline. When a teen boy is filmed blowing up a mall and then a church, Avi is transfixed by the fact that the boy doesn't appear to have a bomb in either video, and that he survives both attacks. Then, a door materializes in his attic and a group of normal-seeming people with extraordinary abilities reveals that not only do superhumans exist, but the bomber and Emmaline are each one of them. The superhumans have wanted to go public for decades, and with his writing experience, Avi is just the man to introduce them to the world. But their exposure prompts widespread panic, mob violence, and new, prejudiced laws. Much like the X-Men comics, Proehl masterfully uses science fiction as a lens to examine social inequality and human evil; readers will find it hard to believe that they're not actually looking into the near future. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

Proehl (A Hundred Thousand Worlds, 2016, etc.) returns with a literary science fiction novel. Someone really needs to introduce Proehl to the concept of fan fiction, as all his books to date fall firmly into that realm. His first novel was RPF—real person fiction—about the two stars of TV's The X-Files. Names and details were changed, but virtually any reader could see that the premise was "What if Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny got married and had a baby?" This second novel, is, well, an X-Men AU—or alternate universe fanfic—which asks: What if the X-Men was literary fiction? Names and details are altered again, but the story is one most readers will know—and one that Proehl must already know himself. Avi realizes his daughter, Emmeline, is more than just precocious—she has abilities beyond his understanding. She attracts the attention of other superpowered people, and soon she's taken to a special school where she will learn to control what she can do. They call themselves Resonants, and eventually they reveal themselves to t he world, but the public quickly fears and despises them for what they are. (There's also one Resonant who uses his powers for evil and destruction, because of course there is.) The government soon turns against the Resonants, one particularly odious senator pushes to create a registry, and some Resonants are put into government camps. At nearly 500 pages in length, the story suffocates any action with burdensome, put-on prose, culminating in a not-very-satisfying climax and ending. Indeed, at times the entire book feels as if it's been run through a writing residency algorithm: "He looks up at her, face cherubic with subcutaneous fat and an acceptance of oncoming death." Or when Fahima, a queer Muslim woman who can effortlessly comprehend mechanical objects and even control them with her mind, can also sense the feelings of appliances: "The aging fridge understood that there was no rest coming for it and wanted only to die." You and me both, fridge. Readers should seek out less pretentious and more original X-Men fanfic online instead. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

A host of varied characters grapple with alienation and bigotry in this complex novel about the cost of being different. A few people have begun to manifest supernatural abilities such as telekinesis and bending time. Calling themselves Resonants, they establish a school where their children can be taught to master their powers. But when their existence is revealed to the world, ordinary humans react with fear, suspicion, and calls for their eradication. What distinguishes this effort by Proehl (A Hundred Thousand Words) from myriad other takes on this age-old trope is the book's sharp, even uncomfortable awareness of the ways in which factors such as race, religion, and queerness would complicate and compound the bigotry such individuals face. The story is set in present-day New York and doesn't shy from confronting the burgeoning trends of domestic terrorism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of prejudice. The characters are intricately human, each rendered in minute and thoughtful detail that pushes back against stereotypes. Though the teetering tower of subplots and POV characters sometimes crashes into confusion, the book builds effectively to a brutally realistic, deeply tense, and worrying climax and leaves the reader eagerly awaiting the next installment. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.)

Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly.