A magnificent supernatural saga striding confidently toward its finale.
This third installment of a YA series brings a superlative menace to New Orleans that may require vampires and witches to join forces.
Eight months ago, a monstrous hurricane demolished New Orleans. Sixteen-year-old Adele Le Moyne, despite the witch mark on her arm, has seemingly lost her telekinetic powers. Her coven, including friends Désirée Borges and Isaac Thompson, battled the Medici vampires. Isaac slayed Adele’s undead mother, Brigitte, to save the teenager’s life. Now, Adele has withdrawn from her coven and existence in general. Only when Niccoló, the Medici sibling who’ll do anything for Adele, throws her mother a funeral does the teen reawaken to the world. Meanwhile, Isaac, Désirée, and their friend Codi Daure have been tracking down those possessed by the rogue spirits disturbed by Callisto Salazar and his Ghost Drinkers coven. The trio also strives to protect the city’s numerous cemeteries from Calli’s succubi by using hexenspiegel (witches’ mirrors). Eventually, Adele warms to Nicco’s charm, allowing him to begin exploring ways to restore her magic despite the warning written by her ancestor Adeline Saint-Germaine 300 years ago: “Be safe and stay away from Niccoló Medici.” A vicious attack on Isaac by Emilio Medici bolsters this statement. But Nicco has his own plan to find Calli before an already ruined city can be brought even lower. In this penultimate volume of her series, Arden (The Romeo Catchers, 2017, etc.) brings further heat to her love triangle and a broader, more otherworldly canvas on which to paint her cast’s heroism. The plot’s historical context is, as always, wretched yet captivating. Adele visits Jazzland, an amusement park devastated by the storm, and walks “through piles of stuffed bears in prize booths that looked like they’d been mauled by real ones, and dunking tanks filled with swamp water.” Meaty supernatural components include the lwa (Haitian Vodou spirits) and the accompanying Guinée (a part of the Afterworld). But the true reward for the author’s fans is the continuously vital portrayal of these characters. Adele’s friends love her, and a sweeping gesture in the final third is sure to make the audience misty-eyed.
A magnificent supernatural saga striding confidently toward its finale.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9897577-4-4
Page Count: 650
Publisher: For the Art of it Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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