Cope’s sequel to Countryside: The Book of the Wise (2014) sees young Luke and his friends try to outwit a villainous hunter to find the location of a magical artifact.
Luke Rayburn, the 12-year-old scion of the magical town called Countryside, has spent his summer vacation with his family on the island of Shalloke, off the coast of the Carolinas. Before returning to their secret home, the Rayburn clan encounters bane wolves. Luke uses his light training to protect himself with darkness, but his father soon chastises him against doing so again: “It twists your senses and it scars your soul.” The boy also learns that a suspicious character he saw on the train ride home—a grizzled hunter—leads the wolf-pack using darkness. After returning home, Luke helps defend a burning orchard against gnomes and begins further training with Mayeem (a mermaid) and Samech (a centaur). Luke then hears a campfire tale about tragic lovers Peter and Anora—but perhaps the fate of these fictional characters, which is tied up with the wolves’, contains a grain of truth. Eventually, the young hero grows frustrated with the adults keeping him from learning more about the Book of the Wise; aided by Matt, Sam, and a few others, he leaps into the fray against the evil threatening Countryside. Cope uses this second outing, with its large magical cast, to weave another satisfying mystery and continue the long game of his overall tale. Early on, he reminds readers that a prophetic red star to the north foretells doom with the line, “Seems higher this year...Only six years left.” His dynamic of light and darkness recalls Star Wars, as does the mystical theme that “everything is made of the Flame” and that those who ignore it “wear a blindfold.” Nevertheless, the story’s elemental disciplines offer truly open-ended innovations, because, as Samech says, “your ability to use them is controlled by what you can think of and what you think can be done.” The central mystery will draw readers into an enchanting final tableau, leaving expectations galloping for the third volume.
The glimmering continuation of a detailed, emotionally rich saga.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Tiner Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
12
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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