A violent, dramatic, and ultimately hopeful debut despite some pacing issues.
In this contemporary horror/fantasy novel, a Canadian woman confronts her destiny when a demon claims her as his queen.
Kyra Parker, 35, has been trying to live a normal life with her husband, James Parker, and 8-year-old son, Xavier. She and her best friend, Alexis Bennett, are secretly witches, but Kyra doesn’t talk anymore about the bad dreams and strange events that she experienced in her childhood. Her attempt at normalcy ends when she’s kidnapped and brutally beaten by associates of Alastor, a mesmerizingly handsome demon, straight out of her nightmares, who wants her to rule the world alongside him. “Dreams of angels, demons, magic, war, blood, death—and the fear and hope that accompanied them” soon come flooding back to her, and she’s forced to accept his demands in order to protect family members and friends who’ve also been kidnapped. Thus Kyra becomes demonic herself, wreaking havoc with Alastor, bringing down governments, and building an army of released convicts. Soon her friends and their new allies, including a priest and two other mysterious figures, organize a resistance movement, guided by a prophecy that Kyra’s special heritage will allow her to overcome Alastor’s evil. But first, they must reclaim her from Alastor’s terrible influence. Debut author Tollefson often keeps up a quick pace in this story, which delivers plenty of gory supernatural action and a dash of eroticism. She also handles dialogue and description with facility. However, the large size of the cast sometimes slows things down, as does the fact that several characters have similar names (such as Alexis, Axel, and Alastor). It’s also problematic during fight scenes, as readers sometimes have to track half a dozen characters or more through complicated choreography. The sections that explain supernatural background information, such as magical rules and their exceptions, also drag. That said, the novel’s spirit of resistance to evil will resonate with many readers even if its graphically described scenes of blood, torture, and suffering don’t appeal to everyone.
A violent, dramatic, and ultimately hopeful debut despite some pacing issues.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9953086-1-9
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Lost Girl Creations
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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