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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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