Tales of myth intertwine in this lush and often engaging fantasy.
The line between the Land of Mortals and the Land of Gods is blurred in Faulks’ debut YA fantasy novel.
During Orleigh’s birth, her mother dies. Ormoss, her father, sinks into a depression and is unable to care for her, so he has Meila, a villager who recently gave birth to a baby named Piprin, nurse his daughter, as well. Watching over all of this with displeasure is the Seer, as Orleigh is already defying the destiny that was written for her in the Script, because she was born in the wrong place without a mother. As the years pass and crops fail, the villagers blame Orleigh, believing that she’s cursed. Ormoss’ friend Scorlan seeks the advice of the Seer, who sees an opportunity to set Orleigh on the correct path; he advises Scorlan to give Orleigh to Teymos, the Earth God. When Orleigh disappears one night, the villagers believe that she’s dead. But 10 years later, Piprin, who’d been Orleigh’s childhood friend, overhears an old man tell a tale of handing a still-living girl to a god. Piprin sets out on a heroic quest, hoping to cross into the Land of Gods and find Orleigh. Along the way, he’ll meet the Seer, encounter a field of blood flowers, and attempt to pass through the Great Forest, which is full of creatures crafted from fallen mortals’ souls. Faulks’ worldbuilding is fantastic and intricate, weaving in elements of myth. For example, she tells of “the creator” unraveling herself to form the threads of the world and of flowers curtsying at Teymos’ feet; she also reveals that a vial of immortal blood worn around one’s neck can protect one from forest beasts and that the Seer sets figurines onto a map, just as everyday people set pieces on a game board. The only frustrating elements are the repeated insinuations regarding Orleigh’s fate; readers will quickly understand that she’s special, so the repeated hints about the “unraveling” of the Script seem excessive.
Tales of myth intertwine in this lush and often engaging fantasy.Pub Date: April 28, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2018
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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