An uneven fantasy tale with an encouraging message about embracing life’s risks.
Corna (You’ll Fall Asleep, 2014, etc.) offers a fantastical novel about a fearful girl and the strange events that help her find herself.
Helen is a troubled, nervous girl. She finds it hard to make friends and suffers from extreme anxiety about questions of life and death. One day, her brother Alex, a pilot, asks her to help him celebrate his 1,000th flight by flying with him to any destination she chooses. She selects a lake that she’s been to before that’s tucked away in a far-off mountain range and difficult to reach, even by plane. During the flight, Helen has a strange experience: She looks out over the lake and sees a young girl on its shore whom she intensely identifies with, and suddenly, she feels transported to the lake’s shores and can feel the young girl’s emotions. When Helen tries to explain her strange experience to her brother, he doesn’t believe her. After they return from their trip, Helen embarks on her own voyage back to the lake to discover who the little girl was and why she feels so drawn to the area. Along the way, she makes friends with a man named Johnny, who explains the origins of his village and the towns nearby. Later, she meets nearby homeowners Alice and Martin, who take her under their wing and invite her to learn more about the village’s community. Soon, they reveal that Alice is one of the few people in the world who can remember their past lives, and the village is filled with others who have the same talent.At first incredulous, Helen begins a journey that changes every aspect of her life. Corna’s novel centers on an uplifting message about conquering fear, and it reads more like a folk tale than a contemporary novel. However, many aspects of the story may strike readers as hard to believe, and its lack of clarity may make it hard to follow at times (“You can lose yourself in pain as in happiness, but if you want to be yourself, you will have to be able to keep yourself in the middle”).The dialogue can also be awkward and unrealistic; for example, when Alex doubts his sister’s experience, he says, “Although I don’t believe in paranormal phenomena, perhaps we are in the presence of such a situation.”
An uneven fantasy tale with an encouraging message about embracing life’s risks.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494205812
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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