The Rapture

Starred review from June 29, 2009
Apocalyptic global climate change fuels Jensen's terrifying near-future tale about the human will to survive or, in the case of Bethany Krall, a psychic psychotic teen who stabbed her mother to death, the will to embrace death. Bethany, a patient at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital in Hadport, England, forms a strong bond with her wheelchair-bound psychologist, Gabrielle Fox. As Gabrielle treats her patient, the world outside the hospital suffers natural disasters foreseen by Bethany after ECT shock therapy. Meanwhile, Bethany has been traumatized by the “Faith Wave” views of her father, Rev. Leonard Krall, who believes the Rapture is approaching. Since Bethany is convinced she bears the mark of the beast, she fears she won't go to heaven. Gabrielle seeks help from Frazer Melville, a physicist who takes Bethany's catastrophe calendar seriously. In gorgeous prose, Jensen (Egg Dancing
) paints a depressing but oddly hopeful portrait of a modern doomsday scenario.

June 15, 2009
A troubled therapist's attempts in the very near future to treat an even more troubled teen rapidly escalate into visions of full-scale global disaster.

Even before she killed her mother, Bethany Krall was an unusual girl: bright, defensive and as manipulative in her own way as her father, an evangelical preacher. Now that she's incarcerated and undergoing electro-convulsive therapy in the Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital, she's become so addicted to"volts" that she craves each treatment. And no wonder, for ECT seems to be turning her into a modern-day Nostradamus who can predict meteorological disasters with uncanny accuracy. When Bethany's original psychotherapist takes a"sabbatical," the teen is assigned to art therapist Gabrielle Fox, wheelchair-bound after the car crash that left her married lover dead. Unsure how far to trust this foul-mouthed, sociopathic patient and her increasingly eschatological prophecies of doom, Gabrielle joins forces with a Scottish physicist to monitor Bethany's forecasts and then, when they prove out, to spread the word about them. The pair hope to avert worldwide havoc without destroying their reputations. Not surprisingly, they can't. So what begins as an exceptionally fraught therapeutic dialogue adds more layers: romantic entanglements, forums on faith and its expressions, summer-movie end-of-days scenarios. The results are steadily more unnerving—not only because it's not easy to contemplate the end of the world as we know it, but because the Armageddon sequences are interlarded with confessions of love, therapeutic breakthroughs, revelations of domestic abuse, religious views of the apocalypse, as well as question of whether Bethany's unnerving predictions make her a prophet, a lucky guesser or a satanic figure who's deliberately causing the disasters she's pretending to foretell.

Any one of these plot strands could plausibly drive an arresting story. When Jensen (My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, 2006, etc.) folds them all together, the result is a ride even bumpier than the one that killed Gabrielle's lover.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from August 1, 2009
Set in the very near future, Jensens eco-thriller centers on the prophetic visions of Bethany Krall, a 16-year-old mental patient in Hadport, England, who brutally stabbed her own mother to death with a screwdriver. Bethany is assigned to art therapist Gabrielle Fox, who is battling her own demons. Paralyzed from the waist down in a horrific car accident, Gabrielle has bitterly resigned herself to a life of solitude until she meets Bethany and recognizes that the horrible ecological disasters the girl predicts after her electroshock treatments are coming true. Reluctant to buy into Bethanys claims and risk being discredited the way Bethanys former psychiatrist has been, Gabrielle turns to a physicist named Frazer Melville in the hopes of finding some sort of scientific rationale to counter Bethanys predictions. Instead, both become convinced of the girls eerie prescience. They soon realize that they have precious little time to prevent the most devastating ecological disaster Bethany foresees, one that will bring about the destruction of most of civilization. Rich in multifaceted characters and equally enthralling and chilling, Jensens novel is so plausible its frightening.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)