by Angelina J. Steffort ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 31, 2019
A smoothly executed fantasy that feels buoyant even while exploring themes of abandonment and redemption.
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This YA novel sees a girl discover a parallel world and the truth about her lineage.
Maray Johnson has received an ornate dagger for her 16th birthday. Her father, Gerwin, tells her it once belonged to her grandmother Rhia. Maray’s mother, Laura, left five years ago to live in Texas. Father and daughter have recently moved from Washington, D.C., to Vienna because Gerwin is an ambassador for an IT company. Later, Maray strolls in a lovely, deserted park. Suddenly, fog develops and she sees two men sword fighting. When one of the men loses, Maray rushes to help him. This is 17-year-old Jemin Boyd, who’s badly wounded. Nevertheless, he’s able to defend her against a wolf-bear called a Yutu. He then says: “You look so much like the queen regent…I have no other option than to take you with me.” They travel through a tunnel of fog to the world of Allinan. There, Maray meets Jemin’s noble friend Hendrick “Heck” Brendal and learns that she’s a dead ringer for the queen, who hasn’t been seen in public for 18 years. Allinan becomes even stranger when Maray witnesses magic alongside the warlock Corey—magic that she initiates. Do further secrets connect her with this realm? Steffort (The Wings Trilogy, 2019, etc.) brings narrative sleekness to her latest YA fantasy, balancing romance, humor, and unique takes on familiar monsters. While in the futuristic-yet-medieval Allinan, Maray plays it cool, learning of demons that sow “seeds of distrust and destruction” and quipping: “That sounds a lot like the girls in high school.” The author pays homage to classic horror when the Yutu’s blood confers on one character (Ambassador Cardrick Langley) transformative abilities and when readers learn exactly why the queen has been hiding for 18 years. The true star of the novel is its elegant structure, which delivers twists with organic regularity. Sweetness and the promise of new love flourishing characterize the finale, leaving Steffort fertile ground on which to build a sequel.
A smoothly executed fantasy that feels buoyant even while exploring themes of abandonment and redemption.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 266
Publisher: MK
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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