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MY NAME IS MEMORY

Plenty of grown up “Pants” fans will swoon for this hokey but undeniably effective romance, and an ambiguous ending leaves...

Primarily known for her young adult Traveling Pants series, Brashares offers her second adult novel (The Last Summer (Of You and Me), 2007), about a man who remembers his past lives and the woman he’s loved through them all. 

In 2004, Virginia high-school student Lucy develops an obsessive crush on a mysterious new classmate, Daniel. They finally share a kiss at the Senior Ball, but then Daniel calls her Sophia and insists that they have loved each other for centuries. A frightened Lucy runs away, leaving Daniel bereft. He has spent most of his many lives trying to find Sophia, ever since their disastrous first meeting during his first remembered life. As a soldier in North Africa in the sixth century he mistakenly burned down a house (think civilian casualties in Afghanistan), causing a little girl version of Sophia to die—his “original sin.” Two hundred years later in Asia Minor, Daniel helped the woman her soul then inhabited escape from her abusive husband, Daniel’s older brother Joaquim, who then killed him. Throughout the centuries when Daniel and Sophia have met, their ages or circumstances usually kept them apart. However, during World War I Sophia/Constance was his nurse and sweetheart at a British military hospital where she hid a letter of explanation about Daniel to her future self. Fast forward to 2006. Attending college, Lucy has lost track of Daniel. Then a psychic shocks her by bringing up Daniel by name. Now driven to find the truth through hypnosis and the Internet, Lucy finds the WWI letter and accepts her pasts. But she can’t find Daniel. Unfortunately, menacing Joaquim is on Daniel’s trail too.

Plenty of grown up “Pants” fans will swoon for this hokey but undeniably effective romance, and an ambiguous ending leaves the door ajar for a sequel.

Pub Date: June 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-59448-758-3

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010

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DEVOLUTION

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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THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.

Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

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