Fanciful reading for a mainstream audience.
Estes' debut novel traces the mysterious unraveling of a woman’s neat, well-ordered life as dream and reality merge in strange and unexpected ways.
Maggie MacKenzie is a librarian whose quiet suburban life runs with the predictable regularity of a Swiss watch. But with the birth of her granddaughter Julia, Maggie’s world turns permanently upside down. From her first encounter with the infant, Maggie feels an overwhelming, inexplicable connection. At the same time, Maggie finds herself fixating on recurring dreams about two Scottish girls from the 17th century who witnessed a real historical event, the Glencoe Massacre. The dialect used by the pair, however, is less than believable. Years pass, and for a novel that covers a fairly long period of time (about 13 years) the pacing works reasonably well. However, the dialogue is facile at times. Julia develops a wisdom that belies her youth and seems rooted in past lives. Maggie discovers that she and Julia have been dreaming the same dreams. Soon what initially seemed merely bizarre becomes a disturbing metaphysical puzzle that Maggie feels compelled to solve. In her quest for answers, she receives help from a cast of eccentric though static characters: an ex-student-turned-NASA astronomer, a clergyman with New Age sensibilities, a best friend with a complicated love life and an Italian neighbor brimming with maternal insights. Forced to re-examine her life and relationships—including one she had with her long-dead mother—Maggie eventually goes to the Scottish highlands in hopes that she will finally grasp the meaning behind her nocturnal visions. The ending is mawkish and the plot relies heavily on improbable coincidences and a willing suspension of disbelief. But the novel also makes no pretense to be anything other than a fiction about an emotionally repressed woman who finds personal freedom in surrender to the supernatural.
Fanciful reading for a mainstream audience.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1440189104
Page Count: 212
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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