An exhilarating, exceptional story brimming with magic and zigzagging plot turns.
Having just learned she’s a witch, a 20-something joins an exclusive university to learn what happened to her mother, who disappeared years ago, in this fantasy mystery.
Californian Kana Klausen’s 21st birthday comes with a visit from a strange woman. Professor Claire White tells Kana that she is a witch, like her mother, Akemi Wakahisa. Before vanishing two decades prior, Akemi put a spell on her infant daughter that suppressed her magic until she turned 21. Kana can help uncover what happened to Akemi by attending Shipton University—a university for witches in Connecticut. Though Shipton is well known, witches have implemented two agencies to keep spellcasting a secret from the public. Kana takes a crash course in supernatural arts and, at Shipton, quickly picks up her mother’s incomplete, initially undisclosed research in hopes of learning Akemi’s fate. This entails an experiment involving other students, including Vanessa Lake. Despite Vanessa’s recurrent troublemaking, the National Council of Witches sends her to Shipton on a probationary basis; she wears a bracelet allowing the administration to monitor whatever magic she uses. Around the same time, a massless entity awakens and escapes a cage made of pure energy. This entity feeds on the pain of animals and humans but needs “the Promised”—a body that can sustain the entity’s presence. This is a specific individual, but it doesn’t know that person’s identity. However, it slowly regains power and memories via multiple murders, gradually making its way to Shipton, where the Promised is most assuredly Kana or someone close to her. Although this spirited tale begins as primarily a fantasy, it ultimately spins into a taut, surprising mystery. Kennedy (Lady Dread, 2019, etc.), for starters, gradually introduces distinctive characters. These include fellow student Night, who’s both Vanessa’s assigned tutor and Kana’s romantic interest; Vanessa’s roomie, Cassandra; and townie, Ian, who initiates a mostly physical relationship with Vanessa. As the story progresses, readers will anticipate some reveals, like the goal of Akemi’s research or which particular witch is possibly assisting the entity. But others are bombshells, especially during the blistering, twisty final act. Vanessa is a standout among a cast of robust, predominantly female characters. She’s led a hard life in Canada courtesy of her indifferent guardian, Ambrose Levesque. But while she’s rude at first (even to undeserving Night), her attitude eventually lessens in severity—though she remains strong, just as likely to punch someone in the face as use her more unusual powers. Kennedy writes clearly and concisely without lingering on more lurid moments, like sex scenes or bloody deaths. Nevertheless, the author’s best feat here is the description of the mysterious entity—whether it’s in an incorporeal form or occupying one of many bodies. In one scene, the entity flits between three individuals in a matter of seconds, part of a plan that further solidifies it as an unnerving, formidable villain. A sensational ending sets the stage for a sequel that impatient readers will crave.
An exhilarating, exceptional story brimming with magic and zigzagging plot turns.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69175-873-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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