A leisurely plotted fantasy series opener.
This YA debut sees a teenager’s car accident expose her connection to the supposedly mythological Poseidon.
High school senior Callista Ann Sunders and her twin brother, Tad, live on the coast of southern California with their family. Meredith, their mom, is a lawyer, but their father died from a heart attack two years ago. Grandma Anne runs a store called The Broom and Trident and knows that the family has Selkie (sea folk) blood running through it. One day, Anne has a vision and tells Callista: “Don’t drive in the rain today.” Later, as Callista drives to pick up Tad from swim practice, a vehicle forces her truck from the rain-slicked road, through the guardrail, and into the ocean. She struggles to escape the rapidly flooding cabin when a dashing rescuer appears. Callista’s hero is none other than Triton of Greek mythology. He gets her to the hospital, where she lies comatose thanks to the toxic sting of a stonefish. Meanwhile, Tad experiences an elaborate dream that reveals Prince Triton once trysted with Princess Nehalennia, who had been betrothed to his half brother, Proteus. This got Triton banished from Poseidon’s royal family. Triton has now dedicated his life to medicine and plans to keep the bewitching Callista safe even if it means the draining of his own godlike energy. In this fantasy series opener, Sherman (Ocean Depths: A Time, 2017) deftly explores the concepts of healing and transformation—both emotional and literal—by viewing Greek myth through a Twilight-style lens. The author’s own illustrations depict key moments, like Callista’s near death in the truck and Triton and Proteus in merman form, further transporting readers to the shore and beneath the sea. Though Callista spends much of her time convalescing, she does have the presence of mind to ask the mysterious Triton: “Why would someone of your education, age, good looks, and health be interested in me?” Indeed, the answer combines numerous captivating motifs (including mermaid dreams and witchcraft), yet the primary narrative arc—the romance—is paced quite slowly. Readers expecting a strong heroine may flinch at Callista’s dependence on Triton’s healing touch and lavish home. The author also throws down the gauntlet when Triton says: “Life starts from conception for us all.” Fractious events and surprise returns clear the decks for the sequel.
A leisurely plotted fantasy series opener.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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