A ghost story with a vibrant setting but a lack of focus.
In Ghastin’s paranormal novel, a young woman dies in a fall but still finds herself connected to friends she left behind.
Jules Rillingale, a freshman at University of California, Santa Cruz, plunges to her death after climbing a 150-foot Douglas fir. Her mourners include “The Sun-Greeters,” a motley group of her friends who regularly met in a tai chi class and thought they’d be pals forever. They include Jules’ roommate, Patches, an aspiring journalist; Adam, a local barista with an application to a local community college that he can’t bring himself to complete; and Jack, a poli-sci major who can’t seem to find a way to direct his passion. Then there’s G, a mysterious green-haired girl; from the moment they met, Jules felt a strong bond with her. Together, the friends used to explore the college’s wooded landscape, discovering its hidden secrets as well as their own. Now, it would seem that she’s left them behind—but maybe not completely. For reasons that she doesn’t understand, she remains on Earth as an invisible spirit, watching her friends grieve and trying to make sense of what’s happened to her. As their lives fall apart following her death, she’s powerless to intervene, but she wants to help them reignite the passion and purpose they found together. Ghastin’s supernatural tale is strongest when it fully immerses readers in its beautiful, chaotic portrayal of Santa Cruz. She ably captures the heady atmosphere of idealistic college kids mixing with aging counter-culture holdovers (“Patches ran a wooden striker around the edge of her new Tibetan singing bowl. It was ‘very Santa Cruz’”), and she acknowledges the city’s many unhoused people. The novel is less successful, however, at drawing readers in with a strong story. Its supernatural element serves no obvious dramatic purpose, and it’s never clear what unfinished business that ghostly Jules needs to complete, beyond keeping her friends together. Several characters come across as pretentious and unrelatable, as well, and the narrative careens wildly between time periods and perspectives, making it difficult to follow.
A ghost story with a vibrant setting but a lack of focus.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798891323568
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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