Packed with tropes exuberantly executed.
In this YA fantasy debut, a quartet of heroes confronts an evil that has pitted two kingdoms against each other.
In the kingdom of Hestia, 15-year-old Alton Krishnac works as a farmhand for the cruel Reswan family. He and Tristan, his 10-year-old brother, used to live in the Cursed Forest until a fire killed their parents. Alton watches King Ardesribe’s men return the body of the Reswans’ son, James, from fighting in Rothilion. Hestia battles a centuries-old enemy in the Aydar, a race of magic wielders who live in the north. More horrifying, James’ corpse bears the brand of the Dragon Girl, an elusive witch whom King Ardesribe blames for everything from earthquakes to the potato blight. He sends his daughter, Princess Elspeth, to the Reswan farm with a command for Alton and Tristan to set a trap for the Dragon Girl. Despite his nation’s hatred of the Aydar, Alton believes some of them must be good. His mother had been friends with an Aydarian named Sal-Beth, and he now cherishes an iridescent stone she left to him. When the boys find a magically defended cave in the forest, will they begin unraveling the world’s secrets or merely become two more victims in a war spanning generations? Though Leisa Maxwell and Elora Maxwell’s debut features numerous time-tested fantasy elements—talking animals; a shadowy, immortal evil; copious traveling—these tropes retain a winsome fervor that’ll delight readers new to the genre. A keen sense of drama introduces a cloaked figure as Lana Dorsen, aka Dragon Girl. Likewise, the story’s true villain, once revealed, is “a predator blooded with a power so terrifying” that the heroes feel “it pulsing against their skin.” Central to the narrative is the bond that forms between Alton and Lana, two orphans whose tragic pasts never extinguish their spirits. The final third provides a murderous kick, and though it’s reversed in the end, it proves that the authors are willing to play rough with their creations. The novel’s final line sweetly echoes its first.
Packed with tropes exuberantly executed.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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