A satisfying tale that aptly balances teen drama with a bit of magic.
In this YA fantasy, a teenager suspects that the woman next door and her family are witches.
Fifteen-year-old Matt Mitchell and his twin sister, Tina, are still grieving from the loss of their mother. But their depressed father, Sam, wants no reminders of his wife, so he moves the family from Oregon to Hawthorne, Indiana. Matt is a target for high school bullies Clayton Cartwright, Colin O’Connell, and Dylan Jones and hears rumors that his next-door neighbor, Old Lady Hawthorne, is a witch who, years ago, murdered her husband and his lover. But with the Mitchells’ finances tight, Matt offers to tend to his neighbor’s yard. The lady, Vivianne, proves accommodating and quite friendly, notwithstanding some eccentricities. Her niece, Gwendolyn, and her three kids soon leave Maine and move into Vivianne’s home, and Matt quickly befriends the boy his age, Gerallt. But it turns out there may be validity to the witch rumor. The Hawthornes are druids, capable of magic, and Gerallt believes the amulet he wears is a gift from the Celtic goddess Modron. Casting spells against bullies certainly has benefits, but the Hawthornes won’t like Gerallt revealing family secrets to Matt, whom they consider an “outsider.” Firesmith’s (Hell Holes, 2016, etc.) novel, an absorbing tale of two diverse friends, smartly downplays the fantastical elements. Gerallt, for example, views the magic as simply part of his religion and rightly takes offense when Matt suggests the amulet is “some kind of advanced alien tech.” While the book initially centers on Matt and Gerallt versus the bullies, it oddly splits into subplots resembling short stories (complete with their own resolutions): a stolen amulet, the reputed Hawthorne treasure, and a Tina-centric story. The author’s prose is lucid and descriptive, though its most notable quality is the Hawthornes’ pronounced New England lilt (“Gerallt knows bettah than tah call attention tah himself”). The story ends with several addenda, including lists of characters and Maine idioms, and the promise of further adventures with Matt and Gerallt
A satisfying tale that aptly balances teen drama with a bit of magic.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72628-315-1
Page Count: 413
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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