A riveting postmodern world infused with myth, cruelty, and heavy doses of magic.
From author Black (Be Careful What You Wish For, 2013, etc.) comes the second installment in an urban-fantasy series about a group of young people with magical powers.
A group of college students has gone from unleashing the magic of Dungeons and Dragons into the world to dealing with the resulting chaos. After a wild adventure in Book 1 involving a misplaced wish, unrelenting supernatural changes, and the federal government, Book 2 finds the same main characters in an altered landscape. Though their magical abilities have matured, the world around them has become even more barbaric. In an area around New Orleans, there are monsters in the streets eating each other. One character observes, “We did this, you know….I thought everything would be better with magic, and it could have been, but it’s not.” The reader soon learns that this is an understatement. From a group of Minotaurs raping an elf girl to the torture of a cat named Mr. Mephistopheles, the new world is a vicious one indeed. How will characters like Michelle, “with blue fire for eyes and mouth,” and “Mage Lord” Tim respond to a land in which many regular people have been turned into monsters and a shadow begins to spread over the nation? Combining sources as diverse as the World of Warcraft and Norse legends, the novel blends many fantastical creatures and possibilities. Every bit as violent as the first book in the series (“The poor people were raped repeatedly until—battered and bloody—they joined their friends and relatives on the spits”), it’s not a narrative for the meek. Part fantasy adventure, part post-apocalyptic future, this volume keeps the reader guessing in a world full of potential. Though portions of dialogue are mundane (“Fine, you can have it; we will find someplace else,” a goblin comments after he and his cohorts are asked to leave a school gym), the story as a whole is creative, dark, and entertaining.
A riveting postmodern world infused with myth, cruelty, and heavy doses of magic.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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