A warm adventure story featuring man’s best friends and a very special cat.
Sevenlives the cat and her canine friends roam the English countryside playing games and keeping a check on the ill-tempered dogs of Stealers Farm and their human owners. But Sevenlives isn’t an ordinary cat—she’s a werecat; when she’s in trouble, frightened or angry, Sevenlives becomes Sevenia, a half-feline, half-human female creature taller than most men, with a powerful tail and the ability to heal when injured. Sevenlives keeps her mystical identity hidden from her dog cohorts, Sweetness, Sadness, Laughter and Dependable, whose names “perfectly reflect their personalities.” A puppy, Mischief, joins the pack around the same time dogs from the area begin mysteriously disappearing, and when Mischief goes missing, Sevenlives and company suspect the residents of Stealers Farm—Gumless and Molar and their dogs Brutal and Angry—and it’s a race to save Mischief and others from a violent fate. Morrison’s book is peppered with enough theatrical language and magical intrigue to keep young readers interested, but the core of the book is an uplifting story of supportive friendship between very different characters. The book champions courage and teamwork and vilifies fighting, avarice and theft in accessible, touching ways. The story unfolds in just a couple of days, and, because the timeframe of the book is manageable, the dangers and triumphs the characters experience seem all the more real. Though human characters are flat, background fillers, and many of the magical elements of the story are left unexplained (Sevenlives and her otherworldly secret may be slightly confusing), Sevenlives and the dogs—even their names should be fun discussion points for the right age group—are drawn in an open, playful style, and they display enough of the familiar behaviors of the domesticated pets we invite into our homes and hearts to easily endear them to readers. Good thwarts evil in a simple, relatable way in Morrison’s morality tale that entertains while avoiding saccharine moralizing.
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456785956
Page Count: 88
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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