A lush and beautifully written treat for readers of historical and contemporary fiction alike.
Three young women in a rural Minnesota town navigate a pivotal summer under the watchful eye of a spirit with intimate ties to the land.
Midwife Carna and her daughter, Poppy, live with Carna’s Unitarian minister sister, Violet, and her daughters, Daisy and Lilah. The younger cousins love Poppy as a sister. Jane, a long-ago Irish immigrant whose spirit watches over the girls, thinks of them in the “colors of horses.” Poppy is a “golden palomino, prancing, arrogant.” Lilah, the second oldest, is a “flossy white unicorn, shimmering in her slightness,” and Daisy, the youngest, a girl who feels most at home among nature, is a “cautious dark bay whose eyes are always watching.” Jane, who narrates, focuses largely on 15-year-old Daisy, who dreams of Jane. After all, Jane was only 15 herself when she lost her sister, Bess, while aboard a ship to America. She married Bess’ intended, who couldn’t truly love her as a wife, and fell wildly, disastrously in love with Patrick, a stable hand in her husband’s employ. Emphasis is placed on the parallels between Jane’s life and the lives of the Whitsun girls: the complexities and joys of love and sex, unplanned pregnancies, mental illness, and the trials that women and girls often endure at the expense of their minds and bodies. All characters are assumed white.
A lush and beautifully written treat for readers of historical and contemporary fiction alike. (historical sources) (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-3195-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter.
After a Nigerian British girl goes off to an exclusive boarding school that seems to prey on less-privileged students, she discovers there might be some truth behind an urban legend.
Ife Adebola joins the Urban Achievers scholarship program at pricey, high-pressure Nithercott School, arriving shortly after a student called Leon mysteriously disappeared. Gossip says he’s a victim of the glowing-eyed Changing Man who targets the lonely, leaving them changed. Ife doesn’t believe in the myth, but amid the stresses of Nithercott’s competitive, privileged, majority-white environment, where she is constantly reminded of her state school background, she does miss her friends and family. When Malika, a fellow Black scholarship student, disappears and then returns, acting strangely devoid of personality, Ife worries the Changing Man is real—and that she’s next. Ife joins forces with classmate Bijal and Benny, Leon’s younger brother, to uncover the truth about who the Changing Man is and what he wants. Culminating in a detailed, gory, and extended climactic battle, this verbose thriller tempts readers with a nefarious mystery involving racial and class-based violence but never quite lives up to its potential and peters out thematically by its explosive finale. However, this debut offers highly visually evocative and eerie descriptions of characters and events and will appeal to fans of creature horror, social commentary, and dark academia.
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250868138
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A promising premise let down by execution that leaves readers adrift.
An entitled heir to a viscountcy runs away to the high seas in this debut set in 18th-century England.
Stifled by the expectations of his emotionally withholding father, 17-year-old Christopher-Henry Mortimer Davenport, aka Kit, runs away the night before his wedding and talks his way aboard the ship Deliverance, which is about to leave Falmouth, not realizing that its merchant activities are less than legal. Luckily, Captain Reggie Sharpe, who’s from the Caribbean and has brown skin and locs, needs a new bookkeeper since the last one mysteriously disappeared, and he takes Kit on despite his snobbish attitude and lack of sailing experience. Kit spends several months working to win over the crew before discovering that he’s fallen in with pirates. Just as he’s found his footing in his new life at sea, a betrayal sends him back to England, where he must navigate shocking revelations without support from the sailors he’s come to rely on. Unfortunately, the portrayals and discussions of ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and social class differences lack depth and nuance. Sharpe has little personality outside of bossing Kit around, causing their romance to fall flat. While the book’s tongue-in-cheek foreword states that the author has “tweaked history” but “only as far as it will be entertaining,” the line between deliberate choices and inadvertent anachronisms is sometimes unclear.
A promising premise let down by execution that leaves readers adrift. (content note) (Historical adventure. 14-18)Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781665984775
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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