Literary, scary, and made to read with all the lights on.
Cora, Mimi, and Roger are back—back at Bryers Guerdon and in for another dose of mysterious, creeping horror in Barraclough’s follow-up to Long Lankin (2012).
Four years after the defeat of the centuries-old monster Cain Lankin, Cora and Mimi’s dad has finally gotten them their inheritance: Auntie Ida’s ramshackle mansion, their ancestral home. He’s moved the girls and his girlfriend in before taking off back to what seems to be a life of petty crime. But nearly 400 years earlier, the witch Aphra Rushes cursed the Guerdons, and the return of the girls, the last of the family line, has awakened her malevolent spirit. Barraclough’s writing crackles with tension, horror eked out amid dozens of period details vividly evoking rural 1960s England. Cora, now 15, is again the main character, sharing first-person narration with Aphra’s spirit (whose back story fills the first 70 pages) and still-stalwart Roger. A true sequel, written for the already initiated, this never truly recaps the first volume but instead builds on it, even acknowledging the way the experience with Cain Lankin changed the children, particularly Mimi and Pete, Roger’s nightmare-plagued brother. Convenient adults with stores of mystical knowledge and some inconsistencies of pacing can’t detract from the creeping need to stay up all night hoping for a happy end.
Literary, scary, and made to read with all the lights on. (Historical fantasy/horror. 12 & up)Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7864-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter.
After a Nigerian British girl goes off to an exclusive boarding school that seems to prey on less-privileged students, she discovers there might be some truth behind an urban legend.
Ife Adebola joins the Urban Achievers scholarship program at pricey, high-pressure Nithercott School, arriving shortly after a student called Leon mysteriously disappeared. Gossip says he’s a victim of the glowing-eyed Changing Man who targets the lonely, leaving them changed. Ife doesn’t believe in the myth, but amid the stresses of Nithercott’s competitive, privileged, majority-white environment, where she is constantly reminded of her state school background, she does miss her friends and family. When Malika, a fellow Black scholarship student, disappears and then returns, acting strangely devoid of personality, Ife worries the Changing Man is real—and that she’s next. Ife joins forces with classmate Bijal and Benny, Leon’s younger brother, to uncover the truth about who the Changing Man is and what he wants. Culminating in a detailed, gory, and extended climactic battle, this verbose thriller tempts readers with a nefarious mystery involving racial and class-based violence but never quite lives up to its potential and peters out thematically by its explosive finale. However, this debut offers highly visually evocative and eerie descriptions of characters and events and will appeal to fans of creature horror, social commentary, and dark academia.
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250868138
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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