As with the real New Orleans, once you leave this creepier but just as colorful variant, you'll be eager to go back.
A brainy, awesomely resourceful heroine makes her way through a supernatural doppelgänger of New Orleans to track down a missing soul and, in the process, save both her world and ours from unimaginable catastrophe.
Readers of Camp’s debut, The City of Lost Fortunes (2018), may remember a captivating, tough-talking young woman named Renaissance “Renai” Raines, who died in 2011 and reawakened a few weeks later in a “new reality…where myths walked the streets of New Orleans and magic was possible.” Renai’s role in this fascinating if macabre realm is as a “psychopomp,” whose task, roughly speaking, is to break apart the mortal coils of the dead and lead what remains of their souls into the Underworld. With guidance from a talking raven named Salvatore, Renai’s been gradually shaking away her awkwardness with this uneasy calling; that is, until one soul destined for passage belonging to an adolescent boy named Ramses St. Cyr vanishes from the site of a drive-by shooting along with the rest of what should have been his dead body. And so with Sal and another talking bird named Cordelia by her side (or, more precisely, on her shoulders), Renai mounts her ghost motorcycle to probe the corners of her shadow universe to find Ramses. Along the way she interrogates shape-shifters, tricksters, and a wily sorcerer named Jack Elderflower, who has somehow managed to cheat death without having a soul. The more she finds out, the more questions she has; most of them having to do with whatever consequences could ensue for both the living and the dead if Ramses continues to avoid his ultimate fate. In this second installment of his Crescent City urban fantasy series, Camp raises the stakes and broadens the scope of his alternate world; at times his impulse to further explain the nuances of this world make his new book a bit slower going than its predecessor. But the richness and inventiveness of Camp’s vision and the vivacity, warmth, and compassion of his leading woman keep you alert to whatever’s happening next.
As with the real New Orleans, once you leave this creepier but just as colorful variant, you'll be eager to go back.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-87671-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Leaving Viking for the storied literary patina of Scribner, current or not, King seemingly strives on the page for a less vulgar gloss. And he eases from horror into romantic suspense, while adding dollops of the supernatural. The probable model: structural echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca do sound forth, although King never writes one paragraph herein to match du Maurier’s opening moonscapes of Manderley. What comes through nevertheless is a strong pull to upgrade his style and storytelling in this his 50th year. Yes, he actually does write better if with less energy and power than in Desperation (1996). In fact, attacking the race problem in lily-white Maine, he even assumes an almost Dreiserian seriousness in his final paragraphs. Well, the story: romantic-suspense novelist Michael Noonan, who summers in Castle Rock on Dark Score Lake, falls into a four-year writer’s block when his wife Johanna dies of a brain blowout. Now 40 and childless, Mike has salted away four extra novel manuscripts in his safe-deposit box, one of them 11 years old (shades of Richard Bachman!), and keeps up a pretense of productivity by publishing a “new” novel each year. Meanwhile, he finds himself falling for Mattie Devore, a widowed mother half his age. Mattie’s late husband is the son of still-thriving half-billionaire computer king Max Devore, 85 years old and monstrous, who plans to gain possession of Mattie’s three-year-old daughter, the banally drawn Kyra. Mike’s first big question: Did Johanna cuckold him during his long hours writing? If so, will her character reverse our understanding of her, as does Rebecca de Winter’s? And how can he help Mattie fight off Max and keep Kyra? The supernatural elements, largely reserved for the interracial climax, are Standard King but fairly mild. Philosophically limited but a promising artistic shift for a writer who tried something like this with 1995’s failure, Rose Madder.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85350-7
Page Count: 529
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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