Satisfying teen entertainment but also a cathartic, uncompromising tribute to New Orleans.
Set in a storm-ravaged New Orleans, this evocative paranormal romance pits teen heroine Adele against suave ghouls.
Back from Paris and home in New Orleans, high school junior Adele is glad to be away from her coldly distant mother. The city she knew, however, has been destroyed by a superstorm. Adele and her father must adjust to a water-damaged—and frequently nightmarish—reality. Exploring their house, she’s attacked and severely scratched by a crow. Then one night, near her indefinitely closed school, she finds a corpse. This chilling episode leads to an even more surreal event, in which a convent’s shuttered window explodes, showering Adele with debris. After a large metal stake rolls near her and she grabs it, a supernatural talent begins to awaken within her. Later, she reconnects with friends and meets newcomers Gabe and Niccolò Medici, who search New Orleans for missing relatives. At home, she uses her strange new control over metal to discover the hidden diary of Adeline Saint-Germaine, her 18th-century ancestor. The diary speaks of European girls traveling to America with royal dowries in wooden boxes; the girls also used witchcraft to keep vampires at bay. Gradually, Adele sees connections among New Orleans’ high murder rate, her uncanny abilities and Saint-Germaine’s tale. Debut author Arden offers readers a full plate of Southern gothic atmospherics and sparkling teen romance in a patiently crafted tale that will best reward careful readers. Adele is a strong, sensible protagonist who’s just vulnerable enough: “His hand swept my neck as he delicately picked up the thin silver chain, following the tightly woven links all the way down to the two charms dangling at my waist.” Her winning characterization is topped off with subtly drawn superpowers: “Careful not to let them clink on the glass [of the jar] and bring attention to what I was doing, I smiled as a dime did a swan-dive to join the pirouetting nickels.” Best of all, Arden’s insights regarding her fragile city color the narrative with tragic realism: “Everything we drove past—an abandoned supermarket, a dilapidated bank, a gym, a hamburger chain, a laundry mat, a pizza joint, a housing project—everything had that same distinct mark of the Storm left on it: the water line.”
Satisfying teen entertainment but also a cathartic, uncompromising tribute to New Orleans.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989757706
Page Count: 428
Publisher: fortheARTofit Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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