Even those who loved the first book might find too little logic in this conclusion
A group of shape-shifting runaways from the circus, on the run from genocidal hunters, tries to find a home.
Flo, her boyfriend, Jett, and the other shifters just want to find a strong pack to join. The teenagers (all either white or with no identified race) can all shift into an animal form: bears or tigers, parrots or rats, elephants or horses. The frightened escapees, who’ve lost many of their loved ones to hunters, have been seeking some safe place in the woods. The members of this huge cast (with too many names and animal forms to keep track of) have a wide array of agendas. Should they join the wild pack? The wolf pack? Should they even stay together? After brief dramas, many of these newly introduced characters vanish, never to be heard from again. Finally, Flo and the shifters are captured by hunters, who are in league with the lion who used to run their circus, who’d been betraying them for years and who now seeks to strike a bargain. Further dramatic revelations and betrayals await, of course. There’s no attempt to summarize the events of The Wanderers (2015), and with so many characters, side quests, and double crosses, it’s often difficult to keep track.
Even those who loved the first book might find too little logic in this conclusion . (Fantasy. 13-15)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1218-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the potential whimsy of a circus adventure narrated by a shape-shifting mare, this more closely resembles a brutal,...
Flo and her friends are but poor, lost circus performers—who shape-shift into animals and try to evade governmental capture.
Newly turned 16, orphaned shifter Flo is dreading her first circus performance. Alas for her, it's not optional; all of the shifter children who live with the circus must perform regularly as soon as they reach that age. Flo must take a turn like all the others, so after a false start, she takes the stage—not as a girl but as a magnificent mare. Like her boyfriend, Jett the bear, or her nemesis, Pru the tiger, Flo becomes an animal at will. In a modern world of cars and DVD players, the circus shifters live almost medievally, bound under the unkind leadership of the elders, three middle-aged lion shifters. Flo knows that if she leaves, she'll be vulnerable to hunters, government-funded paramilitary forces that are the modern legacy of sworn enemies who have been murdering shifters since time immemorial. So she tolerates the cruelty of her peers, learns to jump through a flaming hoop, and almost has hope for the future when disaster strikes. In a spare first-person, present-tense narration, Flo takes readers through a swoony romance with a massive body count.
Despite the potential whimsy of a circus adventure narrated by a shape-shifting mare, this more closely resembles a brutal, angst-drenched dystopia à la Veronica Roth's Divergent (2011) than anything else . (Fantasy. 13-15)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63450-201-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely, suspenseful, lyrical, imperfect paranormal mystery.
A down-on-her-luck white girl with facial scars seeks safety (both physical and metaphysical) in a story framed by two unrelated true events that occurred in 1888: the Jack the Ripper murders and the decline of Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man.
Evelyn Fallow knows a degrading death is the best she can hope for if she can't escape "the godforsaken East End." A stint working in a match factory with its poisonous fumes left her with only a partial jaw: the deadly phosphorus necrosis would have killed her without surgery. Evelyn's offered a place as a maid for Mr. Merrick. She considers herself unacceptably ugly, but her repulsion at her client's features is extreme, and initially she stays only because the alternative is grinding poverty in the streets. Nonetheless, Mr. Merrick, a white man with an unknown disease, is fundamentally an extremely good person, and Evelyn's quality of life is high—or it would be, if she and Mr. Merrick weren't tormented by ghosts, hauntings that increase as London's serial killings worsen. Luscious period-appropriate prose adds flavor: “Somehow, the serenity of his syncope rendered his features less monstrous." Unfortunately, the trope in which a profoundly disabled character for whom death might be “a kind of mercy” acts as a lesson for a character, in this case Evelyn, with presumably more to live for is a stale one.
A lovely, suspenseful, lyrical, imperfect paranormal mystery. (Historical paranormal. 13-15)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-81784-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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