A gleeful and action-packed, if utterly unbelievable, ride.
In this debut thriller, a war between the United States and North Korea approaches, and only a teenager with peculiar powers can stop it.
Jessica DeLucca, a half-Italian, half-Navajo 19-year-old, grew up on the reservation where she lives. One day, during a fair there, a mysterious older woman seeks her out and gives her a necklace with a silver pendant. It turns out that this innocuous-looking piece of jewelry possesses extraordinary powers that only Jessica can access; for example, it can slice through any substance, even military-grade metal. Meanwhile, the United States government becomes embroiled in a parlous standoff with North Korea, which has somehow acquired a special long-range, anti-ship missile from China, with which it threatens to annihilate the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. Jessica’s father, Jacob, works in a highly classified capacity for the government, and he’s part of a team trying to figure out how to respond to the new danger. Jessica reveals the awesome power of her necklace to him, and he realizes that it could be precisely the advantage the United States needs. He signs Jessica up as a government intern, and the two work as a team to avoid the recommencement of the Korean War. Webb’s novel combines sci-fi, magical fantasy, and political intrigue, making it resistant to easy classification. The pace of the plot is breakneck, and the action unfolds cinematically; indeed, there’s hardly a page without some drama or surprise. However, even for a story that’s explicitly designed to be fantastical, it not only stretches the limits of readers’ credulity, but seemingly dismisses them, layering one implausibility upon another. However, to the author’s credit, it does so very entertainingly. For example, Jessica not only speaks several dialects in different languages—she also plays drums in a Christian rock band, rides a motorcycle with the proficiency and confidence of a professional, and is an expert in eskrima, a Filipino martial art in which she uses a pair of hardwood “fighting sticks” that allow her to neutralize considerably bigger opponents.
A gleeful and action-packed, if utterly unbelievable, ride.Pub Date: May 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-3093-7
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Riley’s obtuseness makes her a uniquely incompetent detective, an investigative reporter constantly surprised by...
Another hot tip from her best informant, her mother, leads TV reporter Riley Spartz (Killing Kate, 2011, etc.) far from the Twin Cities to a murder among the Amish community in misnamed Harmony, Minn.
There was little enough chance of identifying the dead woman who’d been stripped naked, wrapped in a homemade quilt, and dumped in a sinkhole weeks before Josh Kueppers, 10, falls into the hole with the corpse and blows off her face with his shotgun in a panic. Since there are no photos available of the victim and the whole drama is playing out far from Channel 3’s market audience, Riley’s lecherous new boss, news director Bryce Griffin, isn’t eager to turn her loose on the story. But once the dead woman is identified as Sarah Yoder, 18, Riley persuades Griffin to send her back to Harmony, only to get predictably stiffed by Sarah’s mother, Miriam, Bishop Abram Stoltzfus and the rest of the closemouthed Amish. Only Linda Kloeckner, the Lamplight Inn owner who put up Sarah when she ran away from home shortly after committing her life to the community, and Isaac Hochstetler, who briefly employed her at Everything Amish, are willing to talk to Riley, and their information doesn’t do much to sensitize the reporter who asks her confessor, Father Mountain, whether ritual shunning by the Amish community is “worse than unfriending someone on Facebook.” No wonder a pair of attackers break into Riley’s room at the Lamplight Inn and (gasp!) cut her hair.
Riley’s obtuseness makes her a uniquely incompetent detective, an investigative reporter constantly surprised by developments less likely to ambush seasoned genre fans.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6463-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.
Having escaped from a train headed to Auschwitz, Vera and Edith, two young Hungarian women, mourn their parents as well as Edith’s fiance, all likely lost to the Holocaust. Can they forge new lives in the postwar world?
After surviving the war by working on a farm, Vera and Edith realize their hometown of Budapest holds little promise. Fortuitously, a kind American officer sends them to Naples with a letter recommending Vera to the embassy. Once there, Vera, who is fluent in five languages, readily secures a job as secretary to Capt. Anton Wight, an American officer at the embassy. She’s intent upon taking care of Edith, who’s looking for male attention, which she finds with Marcus, a photographer ready to sweep her away dancing and maybe into social ruin. But it’s Vera who falls in love first, with the dashing Capt. Wight, who treats her to dinner dates and gifts. Although Vera tells Anton about her experiences during the war, including her guilt over surviving while her family presumably perished in the gas chambers, her attraction to him quickly outweighs any lingering trauma. However, Anton’s struggles with his own past derail their romance, plunging Vera into more heartache as her path traverses the globe. The romance between Vera and Capt. Wight is, unfortunately, much too easy, beginning with its inevitable whirlwind courtship. Publishing for the first time under her birth name, Abriel (Christmas in Vermont, 2019, etc., written as Anita Hughes) was inspired by her mother's life, and she deftly sketches the postwar world from Naples to Venezuela and Australia, with attention paid to the changed architectural and emotional landscapes. The rubble of bombed cities, the blank map of lost relatives, and the uncertainty of day-to-day survival outline the anguish of the lost generation.
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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