Beautifully written—but after such polished, elegant storytelling, the end feels like a betrayal.
She’s beautiful, popular, athletic, brilliant, rich and in love—yet Oona Antunes feels herself divide into two selves at the Winter Formal on the night she takes her own life.
Frostbitten, battered and bruised, Oona is rescued after her heart stopped beating. Both selves undergo a harsh, invigorating rebirth, and one starts to rebuild relationships: with her unhappy parents (distant father, embittered mother), the best friend she’s outgrown and the boy who loves her. Partly healed, Oona (already admitted to Yale) agrees to spend a week providing college-application advice to gifted students at an American Indian boarding school in New Mexico. The experience—especially her friendship with a Navajo girl—grounds Oona, pointing her way forward. The unnamed narrator, one of Oona’s halves (she terms the other “Corpse”), has a gripping, elegiac voice that invites readers’ trust. The wintry Colorado-mountain-town setting and enormous, cold Antunes mansion skillfully echo the water tropes in plot and theme. The story winds to a peak of tension, then collapses at the end like a house of cards. Big questions remain—why Oona chose this night, this route; why she split in two—whereas explanations provided not only fail to justify suicide, they consign her to secondary status in her own story.
Beautifully written—but after such polished, elegant storytelling, the end feels like a betrayal. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7387-4174-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Flux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Leaves readers wanting more, so it's a good thing the sequel potential is well set up
A flavorful variant of Society Girl meets Scruffy Rapscallion in a steampunk-influenced fantasy.
Vespa is the daughter of the Head of the Museum of Unnatural History. Though she should be preparing for marriage, she wants only to work with the Unnaturals; she aims to be the first such woman in 500 years. Syrus, meanwhile, is a Tinker, one of a Chinese-speaking, tilted-eyed race who protect the Elementals, those magical creatures the city folk call Unnaturals and would capture and display in the Museum. Though their positions initially place them at odds—they meet when Syrus robs Vespa's carriage on the highway—they are thrown together in a quest to save the world from the requisite dark forces. Here, though, the darkness comes through a tricky and clever bit of worldbuilding: the Victorian-esque humans arrived here when Saint Tesla tore a hole in the universe and brought them willy-nilly from Old London. The conflict between the human colonists and the local population of Sphinx, Grue and Manticore can make or unmake this world. Though the steam-powered technological potential promised by "Saint Darwin's Litany of Evolution" and statues of Saints Bacon and Newton is disappointingly unmet in this thoroughly magical world, the rich ambience makes up for the loss.
Leaves readers wanting more, so it's a good thing the sequel potential is well set up . (Fantasy. 13-16)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-2206-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of the series who managed to enjoy volumes four and five will be pleased to find more of the same
The Caretakers fight the mind-controlling Echthroi through a tangle of timelines.
This penultimate volume in the Imaginarium Geographica series features such a massive ensemble of dead white men that it's difficult to follow their storylines. Don Quixote, Aristophanes and a badger quest for magic armor. Charles Williams, original characters Rose and Edmund, H.G. Wells, Richard Burton and a Clash of the Titans–style mechanical owl travel in time. J.R.R. Tolkien and Jules Verne meet a secret society so packed with dead authors that six William Blake clones ("We call them Blake's Seven") fit right in. A Chinese librarian speaking pidgin English betrays the questers, Medea meets Gilgamesh, and triple agents abound. A goblin market is peopled with characters from The Last Unicorn who make jokes from Blazing Saddles; Nathaniel Hawthorne paraphrases the 1988 cult classic They Live; a future Caretaker quotes Darth Vader. "Jules Verne show[s] goats descended from the herds of Genghis Khan in a county fair in an Indian nation in America … " Confused yet? If not, perhaps you'll be able to make sense of a resolution that relies on pasts that never were and futures that might-have-been.
Fans of the series who managed to enjoy volumes four and five will be pleased to find more of the same . (Fantasy. 14-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-1223-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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