An enjoyable, violent novel that delivers a strong-willed heroine and a brooding hero.
A determined teenager confronts a dystopian world and an unwanted destiny in this YA fantasy series opener.
Leonie, an Australian girl who attends community college, eats cold pizza for breakfast, and talks back to her father, struggles to get by. A few years ago, a tragedy stole her will to smile, and now she keeps a routine, just waiting to be a part of something bigger. When she feels “intense heat” blazing in her chest one day, she’s at first terrified, then disbelieving, until finally she starts to understand that she’s one of the Chosen, magical people of another realm. To them, she’s a Pulsar, the first of a group of warriors and protectors to be born after the rest were massacred 200 years ago. She travels to the new world to learn how to tame her gift—and to be granted a shield, a guardian creature she is assured possesses no will of its own. But this kytaen, Korren, turns out to be a person in his own right who has no desire to be subjugated by the Chosen. When rebels against the Chosen government come to claim Leonie’s abilities for their own cause, her decision to treat Korren as a friend gives him the power and will to defend her. In her debut book, Simlett, who lives in Australia, creates a realm that is full of wonder by day but terror by night and populates it with the type of political unrest that teenagers who love dystopian fantasies should gravitate toward. Leonie is a prickly narrator, at once sympathetic and suffering; she alternates between sarcasm and an optimistic wisdom that leaves others inspired. Korren, as a counterpoint narrator, allows readers to see just how much has deteriorated in the world of the Chosen while also providing a look at Leonie that shows her as tougher than she believes herself to be. This solid first volume registers a high death toll, and by the end, the protagonists seem to be facing even more complications—and dangers. This should be a surefire hit for fans of Marie Lu’s Legend and Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogies.
An enjoyable, violent novel that delivers a strong-willed heroine and a brooding hero.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 363
Publisher: WWS Publishing Ltd
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a...
A lovely, lively historical survey that takes in Neanderthals, Hohenzollerns and just about everything in between.
In 1935, Viennese publisher Walter Neurath approached Gombrich, who would go on to write the canonical, bestselling Story of Art, to translate a history textbook for young readers. Gombrich volunteered that he could do better than the authors, and Neurath accepted the challenge, provided that a completed manuscript was on his desk in six weeks. This book, available in English for the first time, is the happy result. Gombrich is an engaging narrator whose explanations are charming if sometimes vague. (Take the kid-friendly definition of truffles: “Truffles,” he says, “are a very rare and special sort of mushroom.” End of lesson.) Among the subjects covered are Julius Caesar (who, Gombrich exults, was able to dictate two letters simultaneously without getting confused), Charlemagne, the American Civil War, Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and Kaiser Wilhelm. As he does, he offers mostly gentle but pointed moralizing about the past, observing, for instance, that the Spanish conquest of Mexico required courage and cunning but was “so appalling, and so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it,” and urging his young readers to consider that perhaps not all factory owners were as vile as Marx portrayed them to be, even though the good owners “against their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves treating their workers in the same way”—which is to say, badly.
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a fine conception and summarizing of the world’s checkered past for young and old.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10883-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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