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 Now, Adele has withdrawn from her coven and existence in general.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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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