Pulpy in places but sweet and sassy enough (à la Gilmore Girls) to attract magic-light teen or women’s fiction fans.
Turning to YA/adult fantasy, prolific mystery writer Lourey (January Thaw, 2014, etc.) tells of a matriarchal clan of witches joining forces against age-old evil.
Faith Falls, Minnesota, is your average small town apart from one sinister surprise: Every 25 years, the Native American burial ground hosts a plague of snakes. In the prologue, set in 1965, Ursula Catalain’s mother, Velda, asks her to craft a deadly poison. Little does 12-year-old Ursula know that her sixth sense for magic botanicals will end with her father, Henry, becoming a merciless ghost. About half a century later, Ursula’s daughter Katrine returns from London, leaving behind a job with Vogue and a failed marriage. Back in Minnesota, she starts work as a local reporter and sets about cheering her depressed sister, Jasmine. The seven female witches of the Catalain coven (including Ursula’s twin sisters, Helena and Xenia) each have different gifts: Katrine helps people become their better selves, Jasmine cooks comfort food that masks traumatic memories, and her teenage daughter Tara can see people’s emotional wounds. When the snake outbreak and a visit from Henry’s avenging spirit coincide, the Catalains hunker in their haunted Queen Anne mansion, preparing every spell in the titular handbook to defeat malevolent powers. The novel is tightly plotted, and Lourey shines when depicting relationships—romantic ones as well as tangled links between Catalains. Inspired by Bryan Sykes’s The Seven Daughters of Eve (2002), about common human ancestry through mitochondrial DNA, Lourey emphasizes the ties that bind in spite of secrets and resentment. Her metaphorical language is often inventive: “cushiony claws of sleep,” “hair curling like tender artichoke leaves,” and the sun “a whiskey-liquid ball of fiery hope.” Excerpts from the spell book are an added highlight. The villain—a “demon in [a] cowboy hat,” cursing, “Damn straight you witches are a lot of work….But I’ll just come back”—isn’t the most intriguing of the bunch, but characterizations elsewhere make up for it. Ursula and Katrine are especially distinctive.
Pulpy in places but sweet and sassy enough (à la Gilmore Girls) to attract magic-light teen or women’s fiction fans.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9908342-1-2
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Toadhouse Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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