An immersive tussle between belief and uncertainty.
A teenage girl faces doubts about love and fear about the origins of her psychic abilities in the second paranormal fantasy in Keltner’s (Possessed, 2019, etc.) Pagan Light series.
It has been four months since 18-year-old Jackie Turov learned to embrace her psychic gift—the touch that enables her to “read” the past and to heal people. It has also been four months since she fell for David, a 24-year-old seminarian. Jackie and David are in love, but in two months’ time David will enter the priesthood (apparently Russian Orthodox), either as a married man or forever to remain celibate. Jackie is sure of her feelings but worries that David’s religious beliefs won’t allow him to accept her powers. This worry only grows when an old woman at church accuses Jackie and Babu, her great-grandmother, of being witches, and it grows still further when the woman starts choking to death and David won’t let Jackie help her. Jackie glimpses terrible events in the woman’s past. She senses that Babu was involved somehow and, despite the love she feels for her great-grandmother, can’t help wondering if she herself has inherited a spark of evil. Babu is evasive on the matter. Jackie needs to know. So when David asks her to travel with him to Russia—where his family lives in a small village near where Babu grew up—she agrees. David asks Jackie to marry him, but Jackie finds herself caught between Christian and pagan beliefs, between faith and magic. Will she and David live happily ever after, or are they fated for something much darker? Keltner narrates in the third person, past tense, mostly from Jackie’s perspective but occasionally from that of her best friend, Jason. The story is simply told yet brought to life with well-targeted descriptive passages, particularly with regard to the Russian characters and rural Russian setting. (The dialogue features quite a lot of untranslated Russian, but this adds to the atmosphere and is contextualized to give the gist.) Jackie herself comes across as less of an individual than in the first book in the series—less of an outcast, more a naïve, love-struck teen—but this regression turns out to be plot-driven; as tension builds and the story ramps up, Jackie at heart remains a protagonist that young readers will invest in.
An immersive tussle between belief and uncertainty.Pub Date: July 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-543919-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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