A smart, engrossing debut from a writer to watch.
When Helen Lambert meets her blind date, Luke Varner, at a trendy D.C. bar, little does she know they’ve met before—over several lifetimes.
In this, her debut novel, Sayers cleverly twists the loves-lost-through-time motif. Helen and Luke are not star-crossed, or rather curse-crossed, lovers from the 19th century, doomed to an eternity of thwarted passion. Instead, Sayers binds them together in a complicated codependent triangle: Helen is certainly replaying a thwarted love affair from more than a century ago, but she did not love Luke then. It all begins in 1895, when Juliet LaCompte, a beautiful 16-year-old French farm girl, falls in love with her summer neighbor, Auguste Marchant. Marchant is a Parisian artist who adores painting Juliet, and as the summer progresses, their desires for each other grow. But Marchant is very much married with a heavily pregnant wife, and Juliet is betrothed to a boy whose farm abuts her father’s. Even worse, Juliet’s mother, a skilled herbalist and sometime witch, finds out about their affair. Enraged that Juliet has besmirched the family’s honor and terrified for reasons Juliet cannot understand, her mother casts a spell cursing Marchant. But the spell is sloppily made, and it not only catches Juliet in its web, but also saddles her with a demon administrator: Lucian Varnier (aka Luke), who begins to fall in love with her, too. Sayers builds tension between present-day Luke and Helen by plunging Helen into a dream world, where she relives her time as a 1930s Hollywood starlet and 1970s rock musician, and each incarnation of Juliet becomes more attached to Luke. Moreover, her own powers as a witch have grown, so perhaps this will be the lifetime in which she breaks the curse. But her own feelings for Luke may get in the way.
A smart, engrossing debut from a writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49359-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Redhook/Orbit
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella,...
A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel.
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prize–winning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it’s about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. “She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine,” thinks the soldier. He discovers that “while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her.” As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to “dogs” reveals itself as more than gratuitous.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59416-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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