After this, readers won't find them so easy to ignore: One could be the nanny next door.
Before her parents died in a terrorist bombing, Hannah was an ordinary Moldovan teen, dreaming of becoming a doctor. Now she sells carrot salad in the market and watches her future recede while her peers plan for college.
Offered a way out—false documents and a high-paying job as a nanny in California—Hannah accepts. Her terrifying journey nets her unpaid slavery as nanny and housekeeper in a house she’s forbidden to leave. Her room is a windowless garage without privacy; her letters home are stolen. Smart yet naive, crushed yet resilient, nearly but not entirely powerless, Hannah grows attached to the children. But their mother abuses Hannah, and their father and his predatory associate stalk her. She finds some consolation watching the boy next door; he’s her age, but they live in utterly different worlds. Hannah’s world, in which men have the power and freedom to treat her body as their property, where any small kindness is expected to be returned in sexual currency, is chillingly credible and unflinchingly revealed. Halfway through this debut, a distracting, melodramatic subplot featuring complicated political intrigue is introduced, but Hannah herself, compelling and believable, keeps readers focused on her plight and that of other de facto slaves worldwide.
After this, readers won't find them so easy to ignore: One could be the nanny next door. (author’s note) (Fiction. 12 & up)Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-01280-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
A lukewarm thriller.
In England, a group of teenagers tries to stay alive when a long weekend in an abandoned castle goes wrong.
When Bessie and her friends decide to join a party their classmate Allegra is throwing in her family’s abandoned castle before it’s converted into apartments, they think the biggest issues they’ll face are making it there before a big storm hits and keeping their plans secret from their parents and teachers. Once they arrive at the castle, however, Bessie and best friend Kashvi discover menacing graffiti and evidence that someone has been staying in the cellar. They also learn that protestors from the nearby village are angry about the development plans for the castle—one of them even argues that it would be better to burn it down. A handful of classmates manage to get there before the storm gets too severe. But when the teens wake up the next day to discover one of their own dead, and the storm makes it impossible for them to leave, they quickly realize that they’re in danger. But is the killer one of the members of the Facebook protestors’ group…or one of their own? Despite the book’s intriguing setup, the prose is dominated by repetitive conversations that convey little substance. Still, readers may still find themselves propelled forward by a need to discover the identity of the murderer. The central cast is racially diverse.
A lukewarm thriller. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593704080
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come.
A heady blend of courtly double-crossing, Faerie lore, and toxic attraction swirls together in the sequel to The Cruel Prince (2018).
Five months after engineering a coup, human teen Jude is starting to feel the strain of secretly controlling King Cardan and running his Faerie kingdom. Jude’s self-loathing and anger at the traumatic events of her childhood (her Faerie “dad” killed her parents, and Faerie is not a particularly easy place even for the best-adjusted human) drive her ambition, which is tempered by her desire to make the world she loves and hates a little fairer. Much of the story revolves around plotting (the Queen of the Undersea wants the throne; Jude’s Faerie father wants power; Jude’s twin, Taryn, wants her Faerie betrothed by her side), but the underlying tension—sexual and political—between Jude and Cardan also takes some unexpected twists. Black’s writing is both contemporary and classic; her world is, at this point, intensely well-realized, so that some plot twists seem almost inevitable. Faerie is a strange place where immortal, multihued, multiformed denizens can’t lie but can twist everything; Jude—who can lie—is an outlier, and her first-person, present-tense narration reveals more than she would choose. With curly dark brown hair, Jude and Taryn are never identified by race in human terms.
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come. (map) (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31035-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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