An action-packed, satisfying love story gets this supernatural series off to a rousing start.
Adam’s (Unforgiven, 2015, etc.) debut paranormal YA romance, the first in her Soulkeepers trilogy, pits angels against demons as they war over souls in modern-day Connecticut.
Sophia St. James, 17, is still grieving the death of her mother when she and her father flee California (and Sophia’s abusive boyfriend) to start a new life in New England. Driving into the Connecticut town of Haven Hurst, Sophia witnesses a car accident and sees what apparently no one else can: an angel saving a life. On her first day of school, she learns that the angel she saw is a senior in her class named Michael Patronus. Sophia has lately been troubled by unexplainable visions and powerful emotions, but Michael and his brothers are unlike anything she’s ever experienced. Her gift of extrasensory perception gets a fresh jolt when a new set of brothers arrives, led by Dante, who ignites feelings of both familiarity and dread within her. Soon she’s embroiled in a deadly conflict between Guardians and Demon Knights, each armed with unique weapons and skills. Sophia is drawn to both Michael and Dante for reasons that she can’t fully comprehend—including some that involve past lives. The climactic scene takes place on Halloween in a haunted house where the horrors are real and the stakes are life and death. The story moves swiftly, fueled by the forbidden romance that develops between Sophia and Michael, and the first-person narration lends Sophia’s account intimacy and immediacy. Vivid descriptions spice up the text, such as when a newly-minted teenage demon plays guitar before an unsuspecting crowd: “his fingers are spiders crawling over strings and frets.” At times, though, the dialogue can be distracting, as it targets YA audiences with trendy allusions such as “Faceboink” and contrivances such as “premature articulation” and “procrasturbating.” However, this classic story of good and evil will still catch and hold readers’ imaginations.
An action-packed, satisfying love story gets this supernatural series off to a rousing start.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 403
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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