This urban fantasy promises attitude and mystery but doesn’t deliver. Seventeen-year-old Madison Avery was mostly killed on prom night by a dark reaper, Kairos. Since she stole Kairos’s amulet she’s technically dead, but for reasons involving Kairos and the morgue, she’s still in possession of a corporeal form. Dark reapers are after her, and she’s determined to protect herself and the cute boy, Josh, who’s a part of the reason she’s dead in the first place. Readers may not know that this novel is a followup to the events of Harrison’s short story “Madison Avery and the Dim Reaper,” which appears in Prom Nights from Hell (2007). The events of that story set the stage for this novel, but the author does a poor job of recapping. She’s equally inadequate at connecting the afterworld to Madison’s present, explaining the many powers the supernatural creatures have and making readers understand complicated afterlife politics. Madison’s thoughts and dialogue are uneven, and the revelation of the reasons behind her unusual death feels anticlimactic. Readers looking for stories of the afterlife are advised to look Elsewhere. (Supernatural. YA)
Pub Date: May 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-171816-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
A rewarding, passionate, and beautifully characterized duology closer.
The love between two of Saverio’s heroes is put to the ultimate test in Thiede’s exhilarating follow-up to This Vicious Grace (2022).
After defeating Crollo’s most recent Divorando, Finestra Alessa and Dante, her bodyguard-turned-lover whom she resurrected, look forward to moving on with their lives. But their battle with the scarabei—and Dante’s return to the living afterward—came with a price: Dante has become fully mortal, having lost his healing powers as a ghiotte, and Alessa has harnessed a harrowing ability to enter people’s minds. With the couple’s happily-ever-after remaining out of reach, Alessa’s nightmares and Dante’s troubling visions from Dea manifest when a friend, momentarily possessed, delivers an ominous message from the gods about another war to come. Dante; Alessa; Alessa’s twin brother, Adrick; and the team of Fonti who protected Saverio from the Divorando embark on a journey to find the other ghiotte—hiding in exile after centuries of persecution—and enlist their help to stop an even greater attack from Crollo during the next eclipse. Readers will fall deeper in love with Dante and Alessa, whose individual explorations of identity and self-love amid impending chaos are heart-wrenchingly honest. But it’s the portrayal of their growth as a pair—in a relationship that’s filled with endless flirty banter, mutual understanding, and acceptance of each other’s flaws—that is especially satisfying and wholesome. Characters vary in skin tone; there’s natural representation of queerness and disability.
A rewarding, passionate, and beautifully characterized duology closer. (Fantasy. 14-18)Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781250794079
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
This tale moves beyond the boom-bang, boring theology of so many fantasies—and, in the process, creates, almost griotlike, a...
Taj, the black teenage narrator of Onyebuchi’s debut, is an aki, or sin-eater—meaning that he literally consumes the exorcised transgressions of others, usually in the forms of inky-colored animal-shaped phantasms called inisisas that reappear as black tattoos on the akis’ “red skin, brown skin.”
This really isn’t his most remarkable trait, however, even as he ingests greater and greater sins of the Kaya, the brown-skinned royal family ruling the land of Kos. What makes Taj extraordinary is the tensions he holds: his blasé awareness of his exalted status as the best aki, even as the townspeople both shun yet exploit him and his chosen family of sin-eaters; his adolescent swagger coupled with the big-brotherly protectiveness he has for the crew of akis and, as the story proceeds, his increasing responsibility to train them; his natural skepticism of the theology that guides Kos even as he performs the very act that allows the theology—and Kos itself—to exist. He must navigate these in the midst of a political plot, a burgeoning star-crossed love, and forgiveness for the sins he does not commit. “Epic” is an overused term to describe how magnificent someone or something is. Author Onyebuchi’s novel creates his in the good old-fashioned way: the slow, loving construction of the mundane and the miraculous, building a world that is both completely new and instantly recognizable.
This tale moves beyond the boom-bang, boring theology of so many fantasies—and, in the process, creates, almost griotlike, a paean to an emerging black legend . (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-448-49390-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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