A well-executed rendition of familiar fantasy.
Grissom, in her YA debut, tells the story of a boy who must choose between two warring spirit kingdoms, one of darkness, one of light.
Johnny Boggs and his parents may live in Texas, but they’re refugees from the spirit world, where the evil Queen Nara is desperately searching for her kidnapped son and heir. When Johnny’s mother is overwhelmed in a fight with Nara’s armies, and his father leaves to go and help her, Johnny is forced to live humbly in foster care here in the real world. Though Johnny attempts to do the right thing and always stick up for the weak, his anger and feeling of being misunderstood keep him bouncing from one foster family to the next. As his 16th birthday approaches, he’s visited by a henchman and a businessman from Nara, who tells him he is the heir to the Kingdom of Darkness—but he also might be the heir to the Kingdom of Light. Johnny has until his 16th birthday to make up his mind over which kingdom he chooses. The decision is complicated by the appearance of two beautiful girls, Danielle and Shay, each sent by one of the kingdoms to attempt to persuade Johnny to choose the correct side. Grissom is a talented storyteller: her prose is energetic and smooth, and Johnny is an angsty, Type A narrator. The novel’s central black-and-white dichotomy is intriguingly complex, as in the Kingdom of Darkness: “There are rows and rows of shops, bars, and restaurants with people scattered everywhere, living life on full-throttled desire. My brain scrambles to explain why this can’t be true. Darkness is full of evil, murderous people, but these people are eating, drinking, laughing, and dancing without a care in the world. My heart speeds up. The so-called truth is shattering before my eyes.” The books ends with an abrupt instance of choose-your-own-adventure-style reader participation, which may prove interesting for the implied sequel.
A well-executed rendition of familiar fantasy.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1628541977
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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