An enjoyable tale about a tenacious witch for genre fans who aren’t expecting departures.
In this debut YA contemporary fantasy novel, a teenage witch faces her first Trial, but a much bigger challenge looms as covens battle one another and vampires gain power.
Allery Alexia Wick of South Haven, Michigan, is much like other 15-year-olds: she remains rebellious, worries about friendships, and studies hard for a test that will determine her future. But that test isn’t the SAT, because Alexia is a witch. Her family belongs to one of the three coven branches, Alerium; her parents are a High Priestess and Priest. Ambitious and stubborn, Alexia resolves to work hard with her mentor, Darren Smalls, on spellcasting and combat-oriented magic and with her after-school club on prepping for the Trials (South Haven Academy for the Gifted and Talented is a public magnet school, but many students are secretly witches). Starting her sophomore year, Alexia makes two discoveries: her best friend drops her, and Kaleb, a handsome new student, makes her heart pound and face blush. (He’s pale, slightly glowing, and needs to be invited inside; Alexia isn’t immediately suspicious.) She tries to sort out high school angst as she attends class, goes to football games, and plays Truth or Dare, but a far more serious conflict materializes among the covens and with vampires—a clash that worsens when a secret book is stolen, with disastrous results for the teenagers’ Trials. With Alexia’s sister kidnapped, the book still missing, and a war to prevent, the story ends on a to-be-continued cliffhanger. There’s much that’s competent and well-drawn in Almonte’s novel, especially his descriptions of settings and how things work, like magic or the Trial challenges. But mainly, the standard YA playbook applies: angst and defiant emotions, love at first sight, vampire boyfriend, and The Hunger Games–like trials that put teenagers at risk. And some elements aren’t well thought out, like a book that’s crucial to keep secret but whose hiding place is easily discovered by a teenager’s accidental touch. (Clueless adults are also from the playbook.) And the unresolved ending, while intended as a setup for sequels, disappoints readers wanting a conclusion.
An enjoyable tale about a tenacious witch for genre fans who aren’t expecting departures.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A brisk, informative history of the myriad roles women have played in America’s religious history. Braude (Harvard Divinity School) has difficult tasks in this slim, generously illustrated volume: to survey hundreds of years of religious history; to maintain a disinterested tone—even when describing the fringes of organized religion—to employ language and explore ideas that will not exclude the lower strata of her target audience (12 and up). She begins by disputing the notion that “women have had little importance in US religious history,” and proceeds to establish her counterclaim with five brief chapters, each of which features a two-page insert focusing on an important woman or religion. Although her text revisits the familiar (e.g., New England witchcraft, the Shaker movement, Mormon polygamy, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union), it also spotlights numerous figures who have disappeared into the gloom of history, most notably Jarena Lee, an African-American woman who “heard the call from God” in the early 19th century and traveled throughout the South- and Northeast “giving hundreds of sermons each year.— In a volume of this sort, objectivity is a virtue, and Braude achieves it, although one wonders if younger readers, charmed by the impartial prose, will believe that Shaker founder Ann Lee did in fact experience a visit from Jesus, who “revealed [to her] that celibacy was the path to salvation.— In similar passages throughout her volume, Braude declines to add any salt of skepticism or pepper of irony. Her survey is inclusive—the popular religions appear alongside the unpopular (though there is no discussion of cults), religious beliefs of Native Americans and African-American slaves receive brief treatment—and her analysis of the long struggle of women to achieve official sanction and ordination is particularly effective. (She reveals the alarming news that only half of “American religious groups currently ordain women.—) Clear, fundamental, and comprehensive within its limited format. (Photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-510676-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
If Elmore Leonard had gotten a securities license, this is the book he might have written.
In this jaunty follow-up to Big Numbers (2007), a scruffy stockbroker returns to tangle with mobsters, women and his own big mouth.
The good news, as the story opens, is that the hero is in the company of a gorgeous naked lady. The bad news is that she’s pointing a shotgun at him. It’s a typical predicament for Austin Carr, a semi-shady New Jersey financial professional temporarily in charge of Shore Securities while his boss is on vacation. But market fluctuations are the least of Carr’s worries. He’s being extorted into opening a money-laundering account for local crime boss Bluefish; an auditor who was investigating his company has turned up murdered; a fetching state police captain figures he’s the key to her organized-crime probe; and his boss’s mother has been picked up for fixing her church bingo game. Carr is continually getting into trouble over his weakness for breasts, his penchant for self-incriminating statements and his vestigial moral sensibility, which, like an appendix, makes itself felt at inconvenient times. On the plus side, he’s got his noble Mexican buddy Luis, a boyish grin for placating angry females, an occasional glimmer of perceptiveness and a stock salesman’s gift for closing the deal, even with people who are preparing to throw his weighted body into the ocean. The way to read this book is to let the hectic, Byzantine, dubiously motivated plot just roll over you without wondering much about who’s doing what to whom, or why. That way you can relax and enjoy Getze’s punchy dialogue and colorful characters–Bluefish’s henchman Max is an especially pungent creation–and his hilarious hangdog protagonist’s dissolute charm.
If Elmore Leonard had gotten a securities license, this is the book he might have written.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 1-59133-238-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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