Several of the right ingredients languish under infelicitous execution.
A psychological thriller promises scandal and drama.
This novel seeks to intertwine two narratives. One is about white 17-year-old Rosie Velvitt and her physically and emotionally threatening home life, which pushes her to extremes (such as booking johns for her best friend, who turns tricks for cash) in order to find a birth mother she thought long dead. The other is about Rosie and her best friend, Mary Perkins (also white), and the truth about why their relationship seems to revolve around instances of explicit sexual violence. While the former enjoys rich development in a nuanced, first-person consideration of family, friendship, and the breaking points for both, the latter feels like a trauma-exploitative gimmick and rests on an implausible (though not impossible) manifestation of mental illness. In what seems to be a collision between Brock Cole’s The Facts Speak for Themselves (1997) and Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender (2006), the dropped hints and whiplash-inducing twist ending throw the entirety of the narrative prior to the last page into new light. While this may hit the mark for some Shyamalan-enthusiast readers, it will disappoint those less entertained by ugly tropes around mental health stigma or simply expecting an intentional inclusion of mental disability to be more thoughtful than a repellent plot twist.
Several of the right ingredients languish under infelicitous execution. (Thriller. 14-17)Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-54864-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
An uneven read that ultimately misses its mark.
Even as her own soul hovers in the “middle” space, her body barely clinging to life in a hospital room, 18-year-old Crow’s thoughts are consumed with protecting her sister.
When given the chance to go on a “walkabout”—an opportunity to revisit her life and make things right—Crow learns that there may have been another side to the people and events that defined her. The only catch is that she must return as someone other than herself. It’s an interesting-enough premise, and the first half of the book will likely live up to readers’ expectations. A skillfully crafted and strikingly bleak Minnesota is the perfect backdrop for Crow’s desperate attempts to save her sister from their stepfather’s lascivious eye. Their mother’s unwillingness to acknowledge this potential threat is both maddening and chillingly believable. Unfortunately, the second half of the novel falls disappointingly short. Here, Crow’s gender-bending return to her past as a young man muddies the waters and distracts from the plot, as does a disturbing side story about Crow’s relationship with her friend Basil. Frequent references to Crow’s passion for philosophy are not followed through in the text, and Crow’s obsession with protecting her sister never allows adequate room for Crow to truly discover herself.
An uneven read that ultimately misses its mark. (Fantasy. 14-17)Pub Date: April 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-241229-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Busy, but at least there’s a death ray
A pair of teen detectives bops between London and Cairo in a steampunk adventure that would probably make a better movie than it does a book.
Octavia Nightingale and Sebastian Tweed return in this sequel to The Lazarus Machine (2012), solving mysteries in a Victorian London jam-packed with automatons powered by human souls and carriages running on Tesla turbines. Their search for Octavia’s kidnapped mother entangles them in a larger mystery, with missing scientists and Egyptophile cultists around every corner. Each solved puzzle reveals a further complication: traitors, lizard people, rocket launchers—even a secret world. Perhaps the number of threads is too many to keep under control; some characters are dropped abruptly, while one major arc comes to a character-building ending without ever developing through a beginning or middle. The overall mystery is impenetrable, but the set dressing of “vacuum tubes and wiring...tools and gears, clocks, glass beakers filled with strange liquids, and disassembled automatons” makes the right backdrop for a novel that climaxes with an airship-vs.-ornithopter dogfight over London. Purists take note: Among the myriad errors and inconsistencies are copious anachronisms detracting from the Victorian feel.
Busy, but at least there’s a death ray . (Steampunk. 15-17)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61614-857-7
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Pyr/Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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