Full of atmospherics, but weak on style, this novel pits a feisty teenaged novelist against a community of vampires in the next town over. Jessica is a high school senior who has always felt like an outsider in her town—she lives with an adoptive mother (no one is sure who her biological parents are), and even more unusually, she’s had a horror novel published under the pen name “Ash Night.” Jessica’s life is thrown into even more than its usual turmoil when a new boy, Alex Remington, shows up at school, a boy so like Jessica’s fictional vampire character Aubrey that Jessica begins to be unsure whether she is living in the real world or in the world of her novels. Throw in a good witch determined to save Jessica from the hunky teenager who may or may not be a danger to Jessica and you have a novel full of vampires, witches, vampire hunters, and (perhaps most evil of all) ordinary suburban adolescents. This should be more fun to read than it actually is. Atwater-Rhodes (In the Forests of the Night, 1999) wrote this at age 15, a fact the publishers are clearly planning to exploit. Not surprisingly, it reads like a work written by an inexperienced, novice writer—clichés abound and many passages are tedious or pretentious. Not bad for a 15-year-old, but not a well-written, fully realized novel either. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-32720-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
More about costume than character or story.
Mysterious deaths plague an island dukedom in a loose retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Annaleigh Thaumas has spent the last few years mourning her mother and several sisters, who died in succession under increasingly eerie circumstances. Her remaining sisters chafe under the lifestyle restrictions of formal mourning on their small, isolated island home, especially their inability to wear pretty clothes and flirt with boys. When their young stepmother persuades their duke father to let them wear bright colors and start dancing again, Annaleigh and her sisters are relieved, especially when a mystical door in the family crypt conveniently transports them to glamorous ballrooms that provide venues to show off their new wardrobes. Annaleigh and her sisters read like interchangeable paper dolls, their painstakingly described gowns, jewels, and shoes the most distinguishing features about them; they spend their time screaming, swooning, and alternately competing for and cowering behind the men in their lives. The island setting is extremely one-note, as if an ocean-themed children’s party became an entire culture, and there is no consistent interior logic to the rules of magic and gods that seem to shift, like the tides and the weather, according to narrative convenience. The writing is self-consciously stiff, and the story reads like a mood board, full of repetitively atmospheric images and scenes but never creating a substantive whole. All characters are white.
More about costume than character or story. (Fairy tale retelling. 14-18)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-3192-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Shadowy, gothic, labyrinthine.
A homecoming spurs a strange family’s transformation.
Eleanor has left her nun-led boarding school after a violent incident with another student. She’s been away for years, without a single letter from her sister in response to dozens of hers and with only the foggiest memories of her extended family. When she arrives at her ancestral home in the small Maine town of Winterport, the mystery isn’t whether or not she comes from a family of werewolves but rather why she can’t find a wolf inside herself. Other questions swirl around her mother, whose body is half-covered in amphibian polyps; her grandmother’s enigmatic accountant, whom everyone is slightly in love with and who hasn’t aged in decades; and the long absence of her maternal grandmother, a stout, lavender-scented woman from France who goes by Grandmere and, like everyone else in this story, is more than she seems. Extended chapters with long, florid descriptions of the setting make the story drag somewhat. Keeping the tale tightly tied to an atmospheric old mansion and a reclusive, tightknit, supernaturally dysfunctional family gives it an almost claustrophobic feel. The decline of an old family with European roots is a classic theme in literature, here given horror-novel elements, with a slowness and complexity best suited for patient older readers.
Shadowy, gothic, labyrinthine. (Horror. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-31430-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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