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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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