A thought-provoking fantasy that’s sometimes swamped by unnecessary detail.
In an alternate reality, common citizens have superpowers, and it’s up to an elite police force known as DANDY to keep control when these powers threaten the city.
This is the first book in a series exploring Geminate City and its unusual residents. Most are born with a superpower, known as a dynamism, or dyna, which is monitored by DANDY agents and their younger cadets, the LIONS. Jeremy Itsubishi is a 15-year-old LION, partnered with his girlfriend, Mandy, and working under her father, Detective Gabor. The three of them are working to learn the cause of a disease called repulsion illness, which causes people’s dynas to “haywire,” i.e., overload and destroy everything in their path. An interesting setup, and the book raises some fascinating questions about life in a society where everyone is superpowered: How much freedom can such a populace have? When do the police cross the line into excessive force? However, more often, these questions fade into the background behind battles, explorations of Jeremy’s relationship with Mandy and her family’s troubled history. Occasionally, Jeremy is funny and sympathetic, but often he seems petulant, and he doesn’t learn or grow enough to fully win empathy. Jeremy has the power to manipulate bullet trajectories with his mind, fodder for fantastic action sequences in a film or comic, but in prose, these scenes grow clunky and repetitive. The tragedy that struck Mandy’s family is shown in a flashback and then never fully explored, a lost opportunity to provide more emotional resonance. The narrative succeeds, however, with an extended sequence about Jeremy’s mother and grandfather. This chapter, which comes late in the book, provides touching moments between mother and son, casts a new light on Jeremy’s power and introduces the plot twists for the second volume.
A thought-provoking fantasy that’s sometimes swamped by unnecessary detail.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1463669546
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.
A novel tells the story of two spirited girls who set out to save a lame foal in 1952.
Mary, age 12, lacks muscle control of her legs and must use a wheelchair. Her life is constantly interrupted by trips with her widower father to assorted doctors, all of whom have failed to help her. Mary tolerates the treatments, hoping to one day walk unassisted, but her true passion involves horses. Possessing a library filled with horse books, she loves watching and drawing the animals at a neighboring farm. She longs to own one herself. But her father, overprotective due to her disability and his own lingering grief over Mary’s dead mother, makes her keep her distance. Mary befriends Laura, the emotionally neglected daughter of the wealthy neighboring farm owners, and the two share secret buggy rides. Both girls are attracted to Illusion, a beautiful red bay filly on the farm. Mary learns that Illusion is to be put down by a veterinarian because of a lame leg. Horrified, she decides to talk to the barn manager about the horse (“Isn’t it okay for her to live even if she’s not perfect? I think she deserves a chance”). Soon, Mary and Laura attempt to raise money to save Illusion. At the same time, Mary begins to gain control of her legs thanks to water therapy and secret therapeutic riding with Laura. There is indeed a great deal of poignancy in a story of a girl with a disability fighting to defend the intrinsic value of a lame animal. But this book, the first installment of the Dream Horse Adventure Series, would be twice as touching if Mary interacted with Illusion more. In the tale’s opening, she watches the foal from afar, but she actually spends very little time with the filly she tries so hard to protect. This turns out to be a strange development given the degree to which the narrative relies on her devotion. Count (Selah’s Sweet Dream, 2015) draws Mary and Laura in broad but believable strokes, defined mainly by their unrelenting pluckiness in the face of adversity. While the work tackles disability, death, and grief, Mary’s and Laura’s environments are so idyllic and their optimism and perseverance so remarkable that the story retains an aura of uncomplicated gentleness throughout.
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hastings Creations Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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