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
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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