An exhilarating and endlessly charming series finale with a striking hero and a sinister witch.
An immortal teenager vows to stop a powerful witch whose rampage threatens the world in this conclusion to a fantasy/romance trilogy.
Zera Y’shennria’s heart is no longer in the possession of the witch Varia d’Malvane. Now Varia’s witch brother and Zera’s love, Prince Lucien, has it. He offers to return her heart, but Zera declines since her immortality as a Heartless is an asset. She, Lucien, and their friends will need their strength to face Varia, who may now be the most potent witch in the world. She has the power of the Bone Tree, which Zera, as Varia’s Heartless, helped her find. Though Varia no longer has her heart, Zera connects with her via dreams—seeing through the witch’s eyes as the hate-filled figure kills and destroys. Ending Varia’s frenzy, which entails controlling the valkerax (gargantuan “wyrms”), involves the Glass Tree, which, like the Bone Tree, is a source of magic for witches. While some believe the solution is splitting each of the two Trees, which have a shared history, Zera has an entirely different plan with which others don’t concur. She hopes to save as many lives as she can even if that means sacrificing her own. Wolf’s rousing tale is rife with dilemmas. The Trees, for example, consume witches. While some characters suggest merely waiting for the Bone Tree to finish eating Varia (despite myriad deaths in the interim), the Glass Tree may very well do the same to Lucien. Meanwhile, Zera remains encumbered with guilt over her part in Varia’s locating the Bone Tree. But notwithstanding Zera’s past transgressions, she’s strongly sympathetic in this final installment. Her first-person descriptions of her “unheart”—somehow capable of skipping a beat or melting at Lucien’s romantic gestures—are frequently endearing and indicative of the author’s sublime prose.
An exhilarating and endlessly charming series finale with a striking hero and a sinister witch. (acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68281-507-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.
The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.
Autumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart; their mothers are still best friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like[s] him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations.
There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7782-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A heavy read about the harsh realities of tragedy and their effects on those left behind.
In this companion novel to 2013’s If He Had Been With Me, three characters tell their sides of the story.
Finn’s narrative starts three days before his death. He explores the progress of his unrequited love for best friend Autumn up until the day he finally expresses his feelings. Finn’s story ends with his tragic death, which leaves his close friends devastated, unmoored, and uncertain how to go on. Jack’s section follows, offering a heartbreaking look at what it’s like to live with grief. Jack works to overcome the anger he feels toward Sylvie, the girlfriend Finn was breaking up with when he died, and Autumn, the girl he was preparing to build his life around (but whom Jack believed wasn’t good enough for Finn). But when Jack sees how Autumn’s grief matches his own, it changes their understanding of one another. Autumn’s chapters trace her life without Finn as readers follow her struggles with mental health and balancing love and loss. Those who have read the earlier book will better connect with and feel for these characters, particularly since they’ll have a more well-rounded impression of Finn. The pain and anger is well written, and the novel highlights the most troublesome aspects of young adulthood: overconfidence sprinkled with heavy insecurities, fear-fueled decisions, bad communication, and brash judgments. Characters are cued white.
A heavy read about the harsh realities of tragedy and their effects on those left behind. (author’s note, content warning) (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781728276229
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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