First in a planned series, this fantasy adventure relies on well-known tropes, but its complexities intrigue.
In Helming’s debut fantasy novel, a California teenager is sent to her godfather in Greece, where she learns startling news about her true destiny.
“Strong women aren’t simply born. We are forged through the fires of life.” These words from her mother, Diana, have inspired Helene Crawford, almost 18, to be resilient. She’ll need this trait when she gets the terrible news that Diana has been killed, most likely by arson. Helene, meanwhile, barely escapes from a murder attempt and learns that she must leave California, go to Athens, and live with her legal guardian until she’s 21. (Helene has no known father, having been conceived in vitro.) Just as startling, several indications lead Helene to believe her mother is still alive. In Greece, she attends her new school, where she suffers the usual new-girl problems and weighs the attentions of two attractive young men. But odd events keep happening, and Helene discovers she has the key to a portal that leads to Gaea, a strange land—one she’s dreamed about—where the tyrannical Greek gods now live. She discovers information about her mother and learns of a prophecy: one day the Protogena will be born from a virgin goddess and help overthrow Zeus, restoring harmony. As Helene struggles to understand and control new powers, she strikes the first blows against Zeus in what promises to be a long war. Helming intelligently sets figures from Greek myth amid the modern-day Greek debt crisis to comment on greed, hubris, and how ordinary people survive. She offers complexity of detail and adventure with intriguing tie-ins to mythology and science. Nevertheless, many ingredients are familiar: an emotional teenager who seems ordinary but is chosen for a special purpose; a portal to another land; two romantic choices; and wish-fulfillment largesse, such as the portal transforming Helene into a perfect physical specimen. Helene notes that she’s comfortable with herself at last, an unfortunate message for girls: only flawlessness can permit positive self-esteem.
First in a planned series, this fantasy adventure relies on well-known tropes, but its complexities intrigue.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9984811-0-4
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Cool Planet Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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