A diverting read, with plenty of loose ends for a sequel.
An ambitious debut from Cheney: part fantasy, part romance, part police procedural and part love letter to Lisbon in the early 1900s.
Oriana Paredes has webbed fingers, gills on her neck and discoloration on her legs that looks like scales. She is a sereia hailing from unmapped islands off the coast of Portugal; her people are the basis for the legend of mermaids. But in 1902 Lisboa, the golden city of the title, she passes as the human companion to a young gentlewoman, Isabel. The sereia have a fraught history with the Portuguese—they are illegal in the city itself—and Oriana’s role in society is a cover for her real vocation: sereia spy. Spying, however, is lonely and boring until Oriana and Isabel are kidnapped and left in the river for dead. Isabel, sans gills, dies, but Oriana escapes and, in doing so, discovers clues to an elaborate, sinister plot under the guise of a large artwork installation. She exits the river heartbroken, with an eye toward revenge. Within days, Oriana's search connects her to Duilio Ferreira. A gentleman of the city and frequent consultant to the police, he is privately investigating the deadly artwork installation. Duilio is also part selkie—seal person—and convinces Oriana to work with him in solving the mystery. Their mutual trust grows in the process, along with a burgeoning affection, and they are aided by a colorful cast of characters, many with magic powers or mythic backgrounds. Cheney could use more practice determining which details are worthy of explication—Oriana’s webbed fingers are a constant reference, but where the case is concerned, it can be difficult to track who knows what, which of the plethora of details are important and how. But she does a lovely job connecting magical, historical and romantic elements; her Lisboa is a marvelous place to visit, and the installation artwork at the center of the mystery is a creepy, creative plot device.
A diverting read, with plenty of loose ends for a sequel.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-41774-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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