Some strong moments, but a formulaic romance and untethered timeline mar the novel.
In this YA fantasy/historical romance, an aristocratic young woman is in danger from demonic figures.
Soleil Devatt, who’s about to turn 18, lives in an isolated French château with just her father, Charles; her older brother, Frederic, is away, and her mother died in a horse-riding accident two years before. In the surrounding forest live bloodthirsty, pale creatures who venture out, apparently only under the cover of darkness, to attack and kill people. Spoiled, stubborn, and beautiful, Soleil gets put off balance by the château’s new huntsman, the young and handsome Taras. He’s seductive, infuriating, and mocking yet concerned and helpful when Soleil is in trouble, as when she begins fainting and having unsettling visions. When Soleil’s brother returns for her birthday, her cloying cousin Emiliana le Bihan also comes to visit, annoying her when she flirts with Taras. Soleil feels increasingly drawn to the woods; her visionary ability is somehow connected to it, and she knows that the creatures there want her blood. After Soleil’s father has a stroke, the château’s balance of power shifts, and later, with Taras injured and Frederic missing, it’s up to Soleil to muster her abilities for a fiery confrontation with evil. Portera (Beasts and Roses, 2016, etc.) employs overly familiar tropes in the Scarlett O’Hara/Rhett Butler–style interplay between Soleil and Taras, who gets away with unlikely impertinence: “So, you have noticed I exist. I’m quite surprised.” The book’s temporal setting is murky, with revolution recent enough for escaped noble families to come under disfavor; a current “Russo” war (eight Franco-Russian wars were fought between 1733 and 1856); and bustles with ruching (fashionable in the 1870s). This blurriness particularly matters because the château’s extreme isolation makes less sense in the later 19th century. The ending does have some unexpected twists in store, however, and Portera does write some effective passages, as when describing Soleil’s “eerie feeling” about Emiliana perusing an occult book’s engravings: “She had turned each page slowly and easily, taking in each depraved image as though it was familiar. As though she was home.” A sequel is planned.
Some strong moments, but a formulaic romance and untethered timeline mar the novel.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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