Full of family secrets, mysteries, time travel, deities, and more, this work delivers a bold, richly realized tale from a...
Three sisters discover truths about their family that they never imagined in this debut fantasy novel.
Teenage sisters Charlemagne, Cairo, and Pendragon (“Penny”) Agonistes are devastated when their mother, Athene, disappears. Their father is so emotionally unequipped to cope with the loss that he decides his daughters should leave America and live with their grandparents in England. Upon arriving across the pond, they discover that their family is even more eccentric than they realized. To begin with, their grandmother and grandfather like to be referred to as the Ogg and Gaffer. Then, shortly after the sisters arrive, their two hosts take the girls to a wake for someone they didn’t even know, which is filled with strange people performing bizarre customs. They involve Charlemagne in one of the rituals, during which she seems to slip out of her body and wake up as a different person—a Lady of Serendip—in a different time and place, the magical land of Seraphina. She lives an entire life in the span of a few minutes before coming back to herself at the party. Her sisters then have similar experiences, and Cairo is later hunted by two anachronistic mythical beings called Hamquist and Crakes, who are the cause of Athene’s vanishing. Although the novel makes use of a number of familiar fantasy tropes, it blends them in a fresh and exciting way that rarely feels less than utterly original. One of the story’s central conflicts regarding the goddess of Seraphina, who may not be as beneficent as she seems, is particularly intriguing. Houghton’s prose is similarly strong. The narrative explores the sisters’ attributes (“Penny was the cleverest of the sisters. Too clever, Charlemagne sometimes worried. It distanced her from people her own age and she didn’t have many friends to begin with”). And while the characters aren’t as three-dimensional as they could be, the book’s world is brought to life so vividly that a reader rarely notices this as a major flaw, particularly because the sisters’ bond is depicted with such authenticity and love.
Full of family secrets, mysteries, time travel, deities, and more, this work delivers a bold, richly realized tale from a promising new author.Pub Date: June 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-909845-94-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tenebris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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