The ending suggests there’s more to come, and both the strong cast and intriguing premise hold promise for sequels—if the...
In a tale that is electrifying until suddenly going dead, a fiery-tempered teenager who can read and alter memories discovers that she’s being played.
Stringing Leesie along by promising to help her regain 17 years of mysteriously lost memories, Preceptor Tobias sends her on missions to Navigate certain minds and sometimes Extract certain memories. Her unquestioning acceptance hits the rocks, though, when she is dispatched to insinuate herself into the circle of Eri, a brilliant neuroscientist’s daughter. In doing so, she learns not only that her identity is blown, but that she has been a tool in a nefarious scheme to give Tobias and the shadowy cabal behind him power over everyone’s memories. Written in present-tense staccato sentences, Leesie’s narrative charges along—and even without using her Navigational talents, so uncommonly masterful is she at observing and manipulating people that just watching her subtly worm her way into the social structure at Eri’s exclusive high school makes riveting reading. Unfortunately, the tale abruptly grinds to a halt for a long revelatory explication from Eri and one of her schoolmates (both of whom, it turns out, have powers of their own) that’s followed by a contrived climax.
The ending suggests there’s more to come, and both the strong cast and intriguing premise hold promise for sequels—if the author can manage them without, as here, running out of steam. (Science fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-934133-55-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Mackinac Island Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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