While this tale’s buildup is slow, the protagonist’s predicament proves a gripping, dicey affair.
This third installment of a supernatural series focuses on an Englishwoman and her otherworldly connections.
In Mathews’ latest volume starring Pandora Armstrong (or Pandora Fry to some), the protagonist is appearing on TV. Pandora is a panelist a few days a week on a show called Straight Talking. She and her colleagues discuss topics of the day, explorations that occasionally spill into arguments. It seems like an easy enough gig, though if the ratings take a dive, the talent can immediately be replaced. But anxiety about getting fired is the least of the protagonist’s problems. Pandora, who can communicate with certain spirits and once ran a healing practice, is visited by an archangel called Cassiel. He explains to Pandora that she is pregnant with a very important child. The baby is a star seed, and “these star seeds are being sent to Earth to use their special abilities to help us out of the cycle of destruction we’re in.” While this might not sound too bad, Pandora’s partner, James Jay, will surely know the baby isn’t his. The earthly father is instead a well-to-do TV producer named Zac Willoughby, with whom Pandora shared a night of intimacy. Will Pandora be able to have her child in secret, patch things up with Jay afterward, and dodge any thorny questions from Zac? It’s a good thing she has an archangel on her side. It takes some pages to get to the rich details of Pandora’s quandary. Readers first must learn of Jay’s former band reuniting, financial hardships he and Pandoraare facing, and even where his children from a former marriage spend their weekends. Yet once Cassiel enters the picture, the tension becomes palpable. How will Jay and Zac ever understand any of this? Can all of those involved in this peculiar scheme be trusted to have the baby’s best interests at heart? Although some developments turn out to be dull, as when Cassiel and Pandora spend a night at the cinema, the overall fate of the star child keeps things in a constant state of taut motion.
While this tale’s buildup is slow, the protagonist’s predicament proves a gripping, dicey affair.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78535-175-4
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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