Chaya Schechner of Kirkus Reviews recommends The Babel Apocalypse as summer blockbuster poolside reading -- a thriller with a formidable female antihero and big stakes, non-stop action!
"I've been conditioned to think that summertime is for blockbuster stories. For poolside reading, I love a thriller with a formidable female hero (or antihero), big stakes, nonstop action, and no Middle Eastern terrorists (skip the cliches, please!). These starred picks—an SF page-turner in which language is a commodity; a fun twist on battling alpha zombies and other foes while roaming a wrecked planet; and a bleak, violent police procedural set in Copenhagen—meet the above criteria and then some.
In a world where everyone speaks the same language thanks to a chip implanted at birth, what happens if that language network crashes? In The Babel Apocalypse by Vyvyan Evans,corporations control every utterance—a profitable business. But when that business fails, the world tips into chaos. The head of Europol’s cybercrime department attempts to investigate the outage’s source but instead unearths a vast, deadly conspiracy. Only one person has the power to save him: “The enigmatic Ebba Black, a linguistics professor, heiress, hacker extraordinaire, and the world’s last natural speaker of multiple dead or proscribed languages.” The Babel Apocalypse, an energetic series opener, has a lot to like—“deeply considered and meticulously described worldbuilding, an impressively complex storyline with numerous bombshell plot twists, emotionally compelling characters, and weighty themes concerning the power of language and the danger of humankind’s becoming overly dependent on technology,” according to our reviewer. “A perfect fusion of SF, thriller, and mystery—smart speculative fiction at its very best.”'
The starred Kirkus book review of The Babel Apocalypse is here.
Full details on The Babel Apocalypse are available on the book website here.
