This fantasy tale creates an earnest, gleaming world that’s hard to leave.
A YA novel finds a royal family under siege by evil shape-changers.
At the age of 9, Andris helped archers with their weaponry during the kingdom of Damare’s war with neighboring Korsa. He also lost his father, a soldier whom Queen Teya failed to save with her healing powers. Ten years of peace have since passed, and Korsa has a new ruler. Damare’s King Llewoen hosts ambassadors from that nation in his Brynmor stronghold to forge a fresh alliance. His daughter, 16-year-old Princess Rhian, finds the proceedings dull and pretends to be sick. Dismissed, she enjoys her solitude. Then a cat brings her a rat in its jaws. Rhian witnesses the injured rat heal in her hands, indicating that she has inherited her mother’s abilities. That night, she utilizes her father’s magical endowment and dreams of a sublime realm called Otherworld. There, an injured lad says that her family must flee Brynmor. He tells her that molothri—shape-changers with blackbirds’ heads—have infiltrated the bastion. Later, King Llewoen confirms Rhian’s dream with his own and sends his wife, daughter, and a guardian named Halkirth to Uncle Hywel’s home in Brydcae. The monarch plans to face the molothri—and their necromantic co-conspirators—with whatever loyal men he can muster. In this fantasy tale, debut author Smith does what the best dramatists do and foists increasingly dire chaos on his characters. While the star-crossed Andris and Rhian are eventually thrown together for a quest in the classical vein (to get help from the fabled island of Mira), the layered villainy of the author’s narrative adds further emotional nuance. Necromancer Selitha Domogalla grew up abused, but raising an undead army for Moreth, the ghost king, has her questioning the random violence. Moreth and his connection to Otherworld and Rhian provide a strikingly executed twist. Andris, meanwhile, comes to love the princess despite being a commoner, for she’s “a candle that brightens dark places.” An epic finale expands on all that’s promised by a story featuring elf scouts, skeleton warriors, and forbidden love.
This fantasy tale creates an earnest, gleaming world that’s hard to leave.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-11757-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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