An entertaining story with religious overtones and a vivid sense of good and evil.
First-time author Johnson’s multicolored, rhyming, free-associating story for teens centers on a loyal girl gang’s encounter with an evil schoolmate.
“Welcome to Starlette Universe,” Johnson writes. “Here you’ll find happiness, pun and mirth—And lots of life-lessons on self-worth.” Her tightly edited story is rife with wordplay: Lighthearted rhyme, palindromes, sophisticated vocabulary (agrestic, id) and neologisms (“darkle”—the opposite of sparkle) flow rapidly amid puns. Occasionally, the text indulges readers in a brief respite of straightforward verse. The story centers on the Starlette gang, including Skylar, “blonde and ditzy—and soo-o-o totally ritzy”; “Brainiac BEKKA loved her ringing cell phone—which was the closest she got to being ‘well-toned’”; and Ashlee, gentle and calm, whose spirit is “comforting as a psalm.” Evil Eva, the new girl on the block, is described as “‘EGO-SIN’tric” and “D-ANGER-ous.” Johnson weaves in the primordial struggle of good versus evil as Eva turns into a whirling dervish, invokes hexes, tortures animals and conducts shocking rituals in the woods that stun the Starlettes. After they rescue a cat that had been cruelly tied to a tree, the girls are at a loss: “It was not the STARLETTES’ style to insult—but they were dealing with the occult.” Potentially unfamiliar words—caveat, rife, valedictorian—are defined in footnotes, as are cultural references like Apocalypse Now, a “[m]ovie about the Vietnam War—which portrays war as something to abhor.” Girl power abounds among Johnson’s well-drawn characters while they alternate between witty and serious approaches to right and wrong. More illustrations could further enliven the book; as it stands, readers expecting to encounter page after page of colorful drawings will be disappointed to discover that the cartoons on the cover and in the introduction don’t continue into the multihued text.
An entertaining story with religious overtones and a vivid sense of good and evil.Pub Date: March 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615611778
Page Count: 66
Publisher: Kulpa Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Like a 12-episode TV series condensed into a single book—categorically engaging, but occasionally overstuffed.
Terrorists planning a New Year’s Eve attack against the U.S. are working with people on American soil in Turney’s debut thriller.
In the post-9/11 world, federal agents pay meticulous attention to seemingly harmless behavior. But what appears to be a routine check on a monitored website in Arizona leads from an Arkansas redneck looking to mix a poisonous concoction for personal reasons to an Islamic extremist in Vegas who has already piqued the FBI’s curiosity. Mixed martial artist Taseen “Taz” Hamshan, with ties to the extremist, is recruited by agent Kyle Morel to go undercover and make nice with a suspected terrorist. But how are the terrorists staying ahead of the FBI? At first glance, readers might suspect that Turney’s 600-plus-page novel would hit lulls. Nope. He allows no off-the-cuff introduction to any character or subplot, providing rich back stories and, surprisingly, never dropping any of the minor plots. Even agents sent to handle mundane surveillance are established in detail—which makes it startling when anyone dies. It’s epic, almost excessively so, but the author does keep the numerous characters from overwhelming the book with subtle reintroductions, such as a soft reminder that Russian intelligence operative Kondrashov is watching the Iranian and Venezuelan presidents. Despite the multiple storylines, there’s cohesion. However, the novel might have benefited from giving stories and characters some breathing room. And the U.S. isn’t the squeaky-clean hero among indignant foreign countries—American citizens must contend with an unpopular president, while Russian agents, despite their country’s neutrality, debate warning the U.S. of a possible jihadist attack. The author laces the story together with striking transitions—evidence being blown up shifts to people watching pyrotechnics at the Treasure Island casino. As the New Year’s celebration approaches, Turney maintains intensity with a natural countdown and an abundance of people in peril. And don’t forget: One of the characters is a jihadist mole.
Like a 12-episode TV series condensed into a single book—categorically engaging, but occasionally overstuffed.Pub Date: May 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615645889
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Lionhorse Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, entertaining take on eternal conundrums.
Celestial gumshoes search for the source of evil in this knotty supernatural allegory.
Recently deceased ex–CIA agent Stewart Willoughby is an Observer, an almost-angel who uses rough tactics in the fight against demonic adversaries. He gets a break when he recruits a new informant, a senior executive at the Company—aka hell—who’s willing to give him information on “The Formula” that demons use to goad humans into sin. (The impish fiends are forever whispering malevolent hints into people’s ears, sometimes in person and sometimes over the phone from infernal call centers.) With his fetching partner and former fiancée, Layla, Stewart embarks on an extended investigation into the nature and causes of evil, from garden-variety manslaughters to horrific genocides. Their sleuthing takes them to some of history’s grisliest crime scenes—and eventually starts to eat away at their souls, as they resort to methods that are uncomfortably similar to the brutalities they want to eradicate. In this installment of his Logic of Demons series, Goodman continues fleshing out his inventive vision of the afterlife as an edgy, inglorious, down-to-earth place, where heaven itself is divided between hostile liberal and fundamentalist factions, and no one is sure that an always-absent God even exists. The devils, as usual, get the best lines; Goodman’s portrait of hell as a dreary corporate bureaucracy is a satiric gem—the chief torments are pointless routine, office gossip and nasty performance evaluations. The novel drags, though, when it focuses on Stewart and Layla’s relationship, which stays blissfully bland even after it takes a satanic turn. But Goodman also probes meaty philosophical themes with sophistication, as his characters wrestle with the problem of evil and the blurry line separating right from wrong. Subversively, he suggests that evil may not be a demonic plot but just another name for human nature. Goodman’s allegorical symbology isn’t too intricate—a farm boy Stewart encounters turns out to be the quite literal embodiment of Time and Chance—and at times the novel’s intellectual debates feel like an undergraduate seminar. Still, Goodman’s cross between a detective novel and The Screwtape Letters makes for a stimulating read.
A smart, entertaining take on eternal conundrums.Pub Date: May 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1432790790
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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