A captivating tale of a teen torn between two loves and threatened by demons.
A teenager must grapple with an epic battle of good versus evil in this debut YA fantasy.
Seventeen-year-old Emma Duvall and her mother, a surgeon, have always moved a lot, but the teen doesn’t ask too many questions. As Emma approaches her high school graduation, Seattle is feeling like home; it’s the first place the pair has set down roots. Things are great until Emma starts seeing supernatural creatures with shining eyes, but the biggest surprise is her mysterious ability to fight them. During combat, she “drank their power” until her eyes glowed green and they were vanquished. Add in the new boys Rowek Zennett, who is “gorgeous in a dangerous way,” and Blaze Thomas, who is hunting him, and life just got extremely complicated. They each tug Emma’s heart in a different way and seek her allegiance along with her power. It’s unclear whether they want to protect her or merely possess her. When Emma finally gets some answers, an ancient battle between demons and the warriors who seek to eradicate them on Earth is revealed. Either Rowek or Blaze could be a demon, but they only tell stories that suit themselves, so Emma can’t trust anyone, her mother included. Until the origin of Emma’s amazing ability and how her mother’s enigmatic past figures into it become clear, the teen can’t follow her heart toward love or desire. As a first-time author, Matsen already wields impressive worldbuilding chops. In this scintillating series opener, the newly unfurled clash between Rowek and Blaze is smoothly and satisfyingly fleshed out, although the power struggle among different demon generals who command various underlings becomes confusing. There’s also no shortage of romantic tension, at times pushing the boundaries of what some parents will be comfortable with in a YA novel. Emma’s mother is the biggest weakness, feeling one-dimensional and absent, although this is somewhat explained by her duties as a surgeon. But Emma’s burgeoning power and her fantastical love triangle set the stage for an intriguing conflict in the next volume, one that readers will be eagerly anticipating.
A captivating tale of a teen torn between two loves and threatened by demons.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-473-47145-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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