Moderately entertaining, high-stakes fantasy; first in a planned series.
In Terrell’s first novel, high school student Andrea Jillian Fox’s mysterious parentage and shadowy destiny threatens two worlds.
Smart, capable teen Jill (only rarely called “Andrea”) finds herself caught between two realms: Mundane Earth and the magical world of Dreh’na. On Earth, her disreputable friends Castor and Spencer Brownsborough constantly talk her into pranks and mischief. Quiet, secretive best friend Johnny Rocket seems more and more unusual every day. As Jill’s seemingly ordinary life continues, people begin to disappear in her community; she’s stalked by an ominous man in a brown duster and black scarf; and she must deal with nightmares and sleepwalking. After she’s ordered to take sleeping pills, Jill’s life spirals down into chaos and she learns that nothing of her background is true. With her loyal friends the Brownsborough brothers and the increasingly strange Johnny, she discovers Dreh’na and the terrible beginnings of a war between immortal powers unknown to those on Earth. She is told of her true heritage, half human and half Shade; i.e., “You could say that she is a new breed of human…a subspecies, carrying the genetic traits of both modern humans and the Endless.” She bonds with the disembodied life force of her beloved Johnny Rocket and stands “at the center of a storm” that threatens to engulf both of her worlds. She is called The End and is told that now she is on the Path to the End in a tale that culminates in a disastrous, fiery climax in Phoenix, Arizona. The prose is workaday, and the style hovers between YA and adult fantasy fiction. The human characters are solid and believable, with the entertaining Brownsborough brothers as edgier stand-ins for the better-known Weasley twins. The fantastical characters fare less well and stock stentorian dialogue sounds forced. The already quick pace accelerates during a furious action scene in the final quarter of the novel.
Moderately entertaining, high-stakes fantasy; first in a planned series.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692261750
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Skyrun Circle
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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