Jayd is wearing white in honor of her marriage to her spiritual mother Oshune, but, as she observes in her introductory...
In the 14th volume of Divine's wildly popular Drama High series, newly initiated voodoo priestess Jayd Jackson begins her senior year.
Jayd is wearing white in honor of her marriage to her spiritual mother Oshune, but, as she observes in her introductory journal entry, her mind is as much on the mundane as on the divine. An incriminating cell phone picture suggests her boyfriend Jeremy is cheating, and Jayd avoids and fights with Jeremy and swaps choice words with “that broad.” Her friends Mickey, Rah and Nigel, along with the two young children in their care, move in together (“I know it's strange for some of my friends to be parents going into our senior year of high school,” Jayd opines in a refreshingly nonjudgmental aside, “but that's how it is sometimes”), and Jayd is the first to hear when money troubles arise and treacherous exes show up. In the meantime, Jayd's archnemesis Misty is becoming a vampire, a turn of events the author weaves comfortably into the book's voodoo cosmology, and Jayd fights Misty and her kin both in dreams and in the physical world.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7582-3119-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Not much forward momentum but a tasty array of chills, thrills, and chortles.
The victory of Jacob and his fellow peculiars over the previous episode’s wights and hollowgasts turns out to be only one move in a larger game as Riggs (Tales of the Peculiar, 2016, etc.) shifts the scene to America.
Reading largely as a setup for a new (if not exactly original) story arc, the tale commences just after Jacob’s timely rescue from his decidedly hostile parents. Following aimless visits back to newly liberated Devil’s Acre and perfunctory normalling lessons for his magically talented friends, Jacob eventually sets out on a road trip to find and recruit Noor, a powerful but imperiled young peculiar of Asian Indian ancestry. Along the way he encounters a semilawless patchwork of peculiar gangs, syndicates, and isolated small communities—many at loggerheads, some in the midst of negotiating a tentative alliance with the Ymbryne Council, but all threatened by the shadowy Organization. The by-now-tangled skein of rivalries, romantic troubles, and family issues continues to ravel amid bursts of savage violence and low comedy (“I had never seen an invisible person throw up before,” Jacob writes, “and it was something I won’t soon forget”). A fresh set of found snapshots serves, as before, to add an eldritch atmosphere to each set of incidents. The cast defaults to white but includes several people of color with active roles.
Not much forward momentum but a tasty array of chills, thrills, and chortles. (Horror/Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-3214-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A frothy mystery that trips over its desire for social relevance.
A mysterious social network sows discontent.
NEED is the hot new thing. The social network claims to provide the one thing each member truly needs. All a user has to do is provide the site with a request and perform a task. These tasks start off small, like emailing invitations to join the site to five people, but the bigger the need, the bigger the task. Sixteen-year-old Kaylee has one big need: a new kidney for her ailing younger brother. NEED has promised her the kidney, but how far will Kaylee go to get it? And how far will her classmates go to get what they desire above all else? Charbonneau provides readers with Kaylee's first-person perspective and sprinkles in several chapters from those of her peers. The result is a web as intricate as NEED's own networking. Less interesting is Kaylee's single-mindedness. The chapters that don't feature Kaylee are a welcome respite from her obsession with her younger brother's health. This trait is honorable at first, but it won’t take long for readers to decide that Kaylee has nothing else going on. When her friend Nate professes undying love, readers will wonder why. Other characters, such as Gina, the school's mean girl, and Ethan, a budding sociopath, are a delight. The book also squanders nuance regarding NEED's social and psychological implications. These themes are spoken aloud by NEED's creator, a comically villainous character who would be charming if one didn’t suspect her primary purpose is making subtext into text.
A frothy mystery that trips over its desire for social relevance. (Thriller. 12-16)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-41669-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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