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
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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