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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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