Fewer words would have made a better story.
A 15-year-old American girl and a half-fairy Irish boy fight to save the gate to the fairies' world.
Clare Macleod was born on Midsummer Day in an odd Irish house with a tree growing in the wall, but after her mother's death, when she was only 5, she and her father moved to the States. She's grown up with half-remembered stories of fairies her mother called the Strange. When they move back to the odd house, with its walls of stone and quartz and the yew tree living in it, Clare recalls and then meets Finn, a boy she shared infancy with. Finn, however, is actually half-fairy, several hundred years old, and the grandson of Balor, a demonlike man expelled from the fairies' world and now on the point of attacking the main gate between the fairy world and ours: Clare's yew tree. If the gate is destroyed, humans lose creativity and magic; fairies lose love. Catmull's omniscient perspective prevents the reader from entering into Clare’s or Finn's emotions: their actions are seen as though through a glass wall. Her mannered, consciously romanticized prose ("Even for Clare, to dive through a window that may be in the sky or may be in the water, a window on an island that floats at the heart of the Strange, was not an easy thing to do") creates further distance, muddling the worldbuilding beyond where most readers can suspend disbelief. Worst, the novel's conclusion isn't worth the number of pages it takes to get there.
Fewer words would have made a better story. (Fantasy. 12-16)Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95347-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A grand finale, presented with a touch light enough to buoy all the self-actualization. Also: giant space worms!
Hotshot pilot Spensa Nightshade completes her apotheosis in this series closer, as human rebels and their alien allies mount a climactic assault on the galactic empire.
Having progressed from eating rats to being a cytonic superwarrior, Spensa is bonded by ties of loyalty and lust to former Skyward Flight leader, now Defiant Defense Force admiral, Jorgen—and also to a traumatized, planet-killing, interdimensional delver named Chet. Spensa would be well on her way to full-blown pacifism if the Superiority’s war of extermination against humans were not ramping up to a newly active phase. Nothing for it but a massive space battle, complete with dogfights, huge explosions, feints, betrayals, and tragic sacrifices…not to mention a swarm of ravenous, vacuum-dwelling vastworms eager to chow down on both sides. Though slowed by Spensa’s and others’ wrestling with conflicting impulses and weighing moral imperatives, the plot features more than enough large- and small-scale action set pieces to please space-opera fans. Better yet, the deliciously expansive cast includes not only humans and AIs but a broad array of aliens and semi-aliens from blue-skinned humanoids and a furry, haiku-reciting, fox-gerbil samurai with a (wait for it) laser sword to sentient crystals and empathic slugs. “The more different types of people we got into the flight, the stronger it would be,” Spensa reflects, and indeed, it’s collective action that proves decisive in the end.
A grand finale, presented with a touch light enough to buoy all the self-actualization. Also: giant space worms! (Science fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593309711
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers...
A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for; he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. Arn does what he must to survive—and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English; this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story.
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers will seek out the history themselves. (preface, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173093-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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