A fabulous story packed with detail that explores both the positive and damning effects of extreme faith in a way that feels...
In Garcia’s debut, the lives of two young girls in early 20th-century Madrid, N.M., are threatened when the combative powers of witchcraft and Catholic mysticism fight for supremacy with devastating consequences.
Garcia’s novel weaves between the lives of two very different young ladies: Salia, a witch raised on the outskirts of town by a selfish mother and an uncaring grandmother; and Marcelina, a Catholic girl plagued by tragedy and death. However different their upbringings and backgrounds, the two girls come together at strategic times in their lives to find solace and balance in one another after the damage they’ve suffered because of their faith. The first time they unite, it’s because Marcelina’s family has been cursed by a centuries-old witch who has risen from the ground and thirsts for blood. The action only ramps up from there. Through family deaths, personal suffering and even a few romantic encounters, the intertwining tales of Marcelina and Salia become incredibly riveting, even moving. The characters are both born into worlds that don’t understand them and, despite mistakes along the way, there is much they both need and learn from one another. With a killer twist near the end and supernatural folklore that feels grounded in reality, Garcia’s title is fluid and well-paced, never taking the audience’s attention for granted. The world the author creates is rich, lush and scary; supernatural fans will certainly appreciate the copious worldbuilding that went into this novel. There’s also a fair amount of gore in the book; death is often described in the most harrowing fashion possible. Though the book drags in places, once the dominoes start falling in the book’s final stages, readers won’t be able to put it down—especially after one character’s very disturbing return.
A fabulous story packed with detail that explores both the positive and damning effects of extreme faith in a way that feels both fresh and authentic.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466429796
Page Count: 368
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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