A uniquely imaginative YA debut laced with irony and optimism.
In Isom’s YA horror debut, a unique teen finds a dark book of poetry with a secret.
In Hays, Kansas, high school student Kali has no friends and wears a mask almost everywhere. She has to hide the tentacles sprouting from her upper lip, which have earned her the nickname Squid Face Girl. A bully named Brett invites her to a party to make amends, he claims, to everyone he’s tormented. At the party, however, the other teens push Kali into a closet with Stephen Coombs, hoping they’ll make out. When Stephen vomits on Kali, she runs from the party mortified. A few days later, after more bullying in school, she cries in an alley on the way home. She then notices a curio shop, run by an old blind man. He gives her a book called A Wretched Little Book of Poems. It’s full of short horror stories written in verse. At the end, Kali sees several blank pages. She adds her own story about persevering and falls asleep in tears. When she wakes up, she’s apparently entered the book, a violent realm filled with mist and monsters. Kali eventually meets Gary, a seemingly normal young man also looking to escape. Isom’s debut mixes fun and horror while showing teens how to turn their quirks to their advantage. Kali’s adventure unfolds via chapters that play like creature features. She and Gary, after escaping his nightmare of a murdered family, jump from poem to poem and battle zombies, a tentacled “Karen” monster, and a house full of cultists. They also make allies along the way, like the fortuneteller Madam Shirin, who warns them of “the man in the mask.” Some of the best advice Kali receives comes at the start of her adventure, from the blind merchant, who asks, “What kind of world would we be living in if people only did what was required of them and never any little bit more?” A clever, hopeful final scene leaves room for further scares.
A uniquely imaginative YA debut laced with irony and optimism.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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