by C. Salow ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Familiar sci-fi/fantasy tropes, but an entertaining read thanks to effective dialogue.
A 16-year-old discovers his true purpose as a Change Agent for good in this debut YA novel.
On his 16th birthday, William Hawk has a vision: “I saw the kitchen, the house, the neighborhood, the world, and the universe, all bound together in a breathtaking, vibrating, color-saturated web.” After attacking a boy (thanks to new power, surging emotions, and jumping to conclusions), William goes on the run. Hitchhiking, he’s picked up by Cy, an elderly Native American who has much to teach. He takes William to a cave, the Hall of Knowledge, covered with drawings and symbols. Meanwhile, Grace, another 16-year-old, lies in a deep coma but can communicate with William telepathically; she asks to be rescued. It seems that William and Grace are Change Agents, meant to help civilization achieve its “final ignition point” and become “one with the light.” Working against them is Roivas, Grace’s malicious twin brother, who murders William’s family and hopes to short-circuit civilization’s ignition. William and his friends must overcome a multitude of problems so that he can enter the spiritual realm, find Grace, and defeat Roivas. By the end, William can count some victories, but he still has work to do. Salow’s novel employs a somewhat threadbare plot element from YA sci-fi/fantasy: the seemingly ordinary teenager with a special destiny whose hidden strengths can save the world. Also overly familiar is the magical-minority trope, in which a Native American, Asian, or African-American seems to exist to serve the white character and has access to wisdom and knowledge that Caucasians don’t. Cy’s legends don’t even make sense as Native American—“Apollyon,” for example, is a Greek translation of a Hebrew word. The tale’s lore altogether is a bit abstract. And the slaughter of William’s family seems a bit drastic. But the story is well-written, with vivid minor characters such as William’s girlfriend, Julia, and his best friend, Arthur, who contribute to the action and help remind the reader that the hero once had an ordinary life full of kidding around and other teenage concerns.
Familiar sci-fi/fantasy tropes, but an entertaining read thanks to effective dialogue.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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