Fun—if overly familiar—vampire fiction made palatable by memorable characters.
In Wilson’s supernatural thriller, a young woman discovers she has a rare, supernatural gift after surviving a tragic accident.
All things considered, Sarah Woodward ought not to be alive. When the bus she was on swerved off the road and plunged into Elliott Bay, Sarah was the sole survivor among the 15 victims. Not only did she survive, she had the presence of mind and absence of injury to swim to shore, where she found herself physically (if not emotionally) unscathed. Soon after, though, strange things begin happening to Sarah; she feels, somehow, both alive and dead, as though trapped in a sort of purgatory. Small injuries to her skin heal almost instantaneously, and she keeps having the same dream of a mysterious cave that feels inherently familiar to her but that she cannot place in memory or the real world. While at an art gallery, seeking out some normalcy in the aftermath of these upheavals to her reality, she meets a young-looking man with a keen, almost stalker-like interest in her, and, despite her best instincts, she goes to a second location with him. She discovers, quickly, that this man, Alex Smith, is not young at all; in fact, he’s a vampire, and more than three centuries old. He has been looking for Sarah ever since the bus crash she survived—he witnessed the whole thing, his vampiric senses able to trace her far-off heartbeat as he heard all the others go silent. Around the time she meets Alex, Sarah is also questioned in the bookstore where she works by a mysterious stranger, Lucy Goodspeed, who claims to work for a shadowy organization known as the “Society of Keepers.” Before Sarah has a chance to talk with Lucy, she and Alex discover something troubling: Sarah’s blood has the capacity to make Alex “alive” again, at least somewhat—after tasting a mere dribble, he’s breathing again, temporarily, for the first time in centuries. When this experiment nearly kills him, Sarah decides it’s time to talk to the Society of Keepers, hoping to get some answers—but the mystery only deepens when, unprompted, Lucy shows Sarah a photograph of that very cave she’s been dreaming of for weeks…
In her first novel, Wilson has managed to find an interesting wrinkle in the classic vampire narrative in the character of Sarah, a sort of supernatural foil who is not the typical werewolf or vaguely Christian ideological crusader, which helps to make this vampire yarn feel at least a bit fresh. That being said, readers’ appetites for sentences like “I can’t tell her I’ve started falling insanely too fast for someone who happens to be a vampire” have been eroded by decades of teen-lit plumbing the exact same dynamics. The plotting sometimes feels too convenient—one wonders about that chance meeting at the art museum—but there is real pathos to Sarah’s character, who feels like a friend from college you’ve mostly forgotten about but who now finds herself in extraordinary circumstances. Fans of vampire fiction won’t find much new here, but those open to an undead thread running through an engaging narrator’s strange experience will enjoy the ride.
Fun—if overly familiar—vampire fiction made palatable by memorable characters.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9798989867530
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Black Island Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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