A lively romp, but one that fails to capture the same magic as its predecessor.
DeGuire’s second installment of the Holiday Spirit series tells a tale of a cadre of monsters and legends under threat from the government and malevolent forces in modern-day Paris.
Bridgett Bishop, a vengeful witch from Killington, Vermont, who kidnapped many of the town’s children, has been thwarted, and the kids have been returned safely. However, an all-star roster of other mythical monsters remains; right from the start, Aoife, a werewolf, executes an action-packed, death-defying rescue mission to save her master and true love, Count Dracula. When those plans go awry, Aoife, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster are waylaid by the French government and brought to an island in Paris’ Seine River, where they’re interrogated by—who else?—the infamous Dr. Moreau. As the doctor grills his sedated “patients,” King Kong breaks into the facility, stealing away Aoife. As the pair fly toward freedom—Kong has a functioning wingsuit, in this iteration—they confront French paramilitary forces, but not before a notable piece of Kong’s anatomy destroys Notre Drame cathedral and kills a dozen tourists. The pair are quickly sentenced to death by a hastily assembled French court and await their fate in prison. Meanwhile, a group of Killington students who survived the witchy horrors have just arrived in the City of Light on an educational trip. Among them is young Dorian Gray Luminita, son of Maria Claudia Luminita, who finds him on the streets of Paris to warn him of his peculiar fate. Not long after the students arrive, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, his lover Esmeralda, and her demon goat, Djali, bring chaos to Paris Fashion Week, unleashing a host of plagues that endanger everyone from fashion designers to actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
As in the first novel of the series, there is quite a lot of incident in this book, with monsters and myths frequently crashing into one another in action-packed sequences. The overall effect can be charming, but DeGuire’s follow-up seems to lack some of the light touch that made its predecessor a lot more fun. In this book, it sometimes feels as if the author is reaching for a greater point or a lesson, as in this passage, spoken by Kong: “Facebook falsehoods and Instagram insight allow the human experiment to continue along its strange path toward an even more indiscernible future. The pendulum swings, settling eventually somewhere between chaos and cognition.” Such moments often come off as pedantic and off-putting, especially in a novel with so much preposterousness and impossibility. Readers who enjoyed the wackiness of the first series entry will find some of the same appeal here, but the novelty has largely worn off and the author’s command of the Paris setting does not feel as natural as it does with the New England locale of the last installment. Overall, the work is a valiant attempt to maintain the excitement of the original but, in the end, it only shows how difficult it can be to keep a good thing going.
A lively romp, but one that fails to capture the same magic as its predecessor.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798990870949
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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