Heavy emotions outweigh adventure in this energetic sequel.
In this second installment of a trilogy, a teenager battles demons across multiple planes of reality.
Emily Alvey is the Ovate of the First Realm, able to channel both Keen (male) and Blaze (female) Fae energies. She’s also a 17-year-old girl of the Second Realm—the real world—where she was sexually abused by her father, Drake, a decade ago. After overdosing on sleeping pills near her Uncle Ian’s Northern California vineyard, Emily finds herself in a detox center. Once she recovers, she falls for her childhood friend Kaillen Raidho. Aunt Nancy also teaches her self-hypnosis techniques so she can visit the First Realm on her own. This helps when her father decides to move Emily, along with her mother and siblings, back to their home in Dallas. In the First Realm, Emily can marshal her Fae powers—with the help of her Shield Maidens—and battle Drake in the Third Realm, a place of his own creation. But the High Queen isn’t pleased with Emily for breaking the seal between realms. A plague has destroyed the Seventh Kingdom, leaving countless Fae citizens disenfranchised in hovels. Emily must find the Champion to stop Drake from taking control of her family and abusing anyone else. Following the events of her previous novel, Harris (Riven, 2016, etc.) once more brings to bear a formidable imagination as her heroine seeks healing. While there are elves, goblins, and giant spiders, this isn’t a traditional quest narrative. Concepts such as sexual consent and self-forgiveness dominate the foreground. Nancy says that the majority of abuse victims “never speak their secrets because they’re so afraid of how people will react.” Emily further learns that her “self-worth is so intertwined with being desired that sometimes I fail to distinguish between friendship and something more.” Valuable as these explorations are, Harris allows a large cast to languish while focusing on the protagonist. Emily’s emotions are kinetically realized, but characters like the High Queen and even Kaillen feel undervalued by comparison. Fans may crave less introspection and more concrete plotting in the final installment.
Heavy emotions outweigh adventure in this energetic sequel.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 408
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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