An imaginative, if uneven, YA story with a praiseworthy message.
Briley’s debut young-adult novel weaves an exciting undersea tale of a boy and a whale.
From its start, this book sets a pace that allows little time for the reader to take a breath. Most of the book consists of dialogue exchanged between the two title characters—Seafoam, a sperm whale; and Kekoa, a mysterious Hawaiian ghost boy. Amidst this rapid-fire dialogue, Briley plunges the reader into the main action of the story in the first chapter, when Seafoam’s relentless curiosity gets him trapped in an extensive underwater cave. Historically, great animosity exists between humans and sperm whales, and Seafoam must make the choice between entrusting his life to Kekoa and being separated from his whale pod forever. The latent distrust between Kekoa and Seafoam sets the stage for conflict, although Briley also ratchets up the tension by including evil spirits, lava rocks, giant centipedes, whirlpools and a host of other sea dangers. Indeed, each chapter presents a series of obstacles that Seafoam and Kekoa must clear, which will likely delight young readers. Unfortunately, the book contains so much conflict that the story’s climax is almost indistinguishable from any other chapter, and the story’s fine theme—that real courage trumps prejudice—deserves its due lead-up and high point. Briley lightens the serious theme with well-placed humor throughout, including Seafoam’s exasperated expressions: “Oh sea rats! What would Dad do?” and “Just one shark-infested moment!” Briley also includes a dozen black-and-white sketches as illustrations, but the amateur images unfortunately detract from the magic and mystery of this fantastical tale.
An imaginative, if uneven, YA story with a praiseworthy message.Pub Date: April 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1614349341
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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