A smoothly executed fantasy that feels buoyant even while exploring themes of abandonment and redemption.
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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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