Some promising elements, bogged down by slow exposition and a failure to launch.
In this YA paranormal urban fantasy, a teenage girl discovers that she has a special destiny involving the world of her dreams.
Vanessa Riggs is more grown-up than most 16-year-olds. She’s spent most of her life in trouble spots around the world, helping out after disasters with her adoptive father, Sam, who raised her after her biological mother’s death. But a lifetime of disaster work isn’t the most unusual thing about Vanessa: she also has an “imaginary friend,” Matthias, her dearest companion and trusted advice-giver, whom she’s always known. She sees him and other figures in her dreams, where she seems to be living different lives in a series of historical fantasies; in them, she’s “the child of the two most powerful Gods in this realm” and faces unwelcome betrothal to someone called “the Son of Am-heh.” Back in her waking life, when Vanessa and Sam return home to McCall, Idaho, she keeps bumping (literally) into “a massive young man” named Tanner Jamison. She shares an instant connection with him, and she also discovers that they have the ability to hear each other’s thoughts. As she has experiences with him, Matthias, and others, Vanessa comes to an emotional crossroads: should she try to live an ordinary life and settle down in McCall, or should she learn the truth about herself, her dreams, her gifts, and her role in a larger world of “magic and monsters”? A vision of coming evil finally gives Vanessa her quest. In her debut novel, Long uses the common, popular trope of a young person with a secret, crucial fate, as well as a special guardian. Vanessa’s disaster work is an intriguing and unusual element, giving her toughness and skills that could prove useful later on. Her romance with Tanner, though, is a very conventional high school love story, aside from its paranormal elements, and her often heralded allure is more stated than shown. Also, her dreams have little context until relatively late in the novel; the story’s hints don’t give readers very much to go on. Nearly the entire volume is taken up with complex back story and stage-setting, which will be unsatisfying for readers hoping for more than a mere overture to adventure.
Some promising elements, bogged down by slow exposition and a failure to launch.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-6970-1
Page Count: 242
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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