A story about a revolution should be exciting—this one is not.
The daughter of a rebel leader and the son of a powerful feudal politician evaluate their potential roles in a revolution.
Aeren’s governance is based on a feudalistic caste structure in which privileged, land-owning Zunft largely exploit the working-class cottagers. The novel opens as Tamsin Henry follows her father’s command to set a dockside warehouse on fire, part of his planned Aug. 5 revolution. In the process she’s injured, and when Tommy, the son of a high-ranking politician, finds her unconscious in the woods, he rescues her, exposing his cottager sympathies. Soon the initial revolution fails, and the leaders, including Tamsin’s father, are held in jail as civil unrest continues to grow. When Tamsin is sent to recuperate in the capital city, where Tommy attends boarding school, she exposes him to the truth of his father’s cruelty. But both Tamsin and Tommy spend too much time dealing with fairly uninteresting daddy-angst, making their eventual transformations into revolutionary leaders implausible. The underdeveloped character voices also sap the chemistry from both a flat romance between Tamsin and a reporter and Tommy’s bland friendship with some fellow students. The early-industrial setting—newspapers are printed with presses, and no modern means of communication exist—includes a few steampunk flourishes that add little to the worldbuilding.
A story about a revolution should be exciting—this one is not. (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-38264-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end.
Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.
The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true—but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered “peculiar spirits” (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs—gathered at flea markets and from collectors—nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob’s overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel.
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers...
A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for; he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. Arn does what he must to survive—and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English; this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story.
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers will seek out the history themselves. (preface, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173093-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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