Nevertheless, a remarkable and distinctive offering for devoted fantasy fans.
A breathless—for the most part page-turning—adventure pits a poor, fatherless girl against all sides in a battle for a dragon’s heart and a city’s freedom.
Petra is clearly the odd girl out when her class goes on a field trip to Ludmilla’s Cosmetics Emporium, and she’s the only one to receive a vial of perfume distilled from the mystical song of a dragonka (a descendent of ancient dragons)—launching events that culminate in revolution. An apparent epidemic of “dragonka fever” allows the monarchy’s police force, the Boot, to impose martial law on behalf of the child emperor, Archibald the Precious. As the city falls under oppression, Petra is occupied with the young dragonka she saves from a deliberate drowning. A permeable divide between living and dead is revealed to be evil at work, and Petra and a ragtag gang of orphans, the Blackhearts, must free the city from an ancient curse revived. Meticulously imagined, Petra’s city is built on ancient layers of cultures and traditions, with magic woven into its fabric. Marvelous descriptions of the city in decline, its vast mysterious underground, and the dragonka and their magical variety provide a foundation almost too rich for the intriguing but thinly supported plot. The character of first-person narrator Petra is nuanced, but she has her moments of blankness, as if the author abandoned her to dash to the next scene.
Nevertheless, a remarkable and distinctive offering for devoted fantasy fans. (Fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9850623-8-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Young Europe Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Regency romances can combine well with science fiction (Lois McMaster Bujold’s accessible adult novel A Civil Campaign...
Regency romance sits uneasily in a dystopian throwback future.
Poor little rich girl Madeline Landry wants to go to university before marrying and inheriting one of America’s most important estates. Madeline’s world is an odd amalgam of romantic notions of history and dark, postwar future. The western half of the United States fell years ago to “China and her allies,” exotic faceless caricatures who smuggle “plum wine, opium, and jade” and who don’t fight like “civilized armies” but are “brutal” when they “swarm.” Meanwhile, the gentry’s entire society rests on its enslavement of the Rootless, a diseased underclass responsible for maintaining the nuclear power invented by Madeline’s own ancestor. From within the cozy confines of her silken prison, Madeline realizes that forcing children to dispose of spent uranium while providing only enough medical care for them to stay fertile is a little gauche. Along with a few interestingly complex secondary characters, Madeline learns about the caricatured evil underlying her luxuries. Will she be able to assuage her conscience by merely scattering largesse to the populace out of a sense of noblesse oblige, or will she be forced to make any actual sacrifices?
Regency romances can combine well with science fiction (Lois McMaster Bujold’s accessible adult novel A Civil Campaign (1999) does so brilliantly), but this awkward merger of the two will convince few. (Science fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3948-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Like many crossover efforts from name-brand authors: overstuffed and underinspired.
Baldacci takes a late and none-too-nimble leap aboard the children’s-fantasy bandwagon with this tale of a rebellious teenager in a town surrounded by a monster-ridden forest.
Vega Jane gets by putting the finishing touches on high-quality manufactured goods (which, she later discovers, are thrown into a pit). She gets inklings both that Wormwood has a hidden past and isn’t the world’s only settlement after the town’s other Finisher flees into the deadly Quag, leaving behind a map and a bestiary that catalogs its creatures. Before she finally follows him, hundreds of pages later, she is forced to compete in the town’s Duelum, which is a regular round of previously males-only bare-knuckle fights for which there is no clear rationale. In labored efforts to create a sense of otherness, the author trots in a host of invented animals (garms, adars, jabbits and so on) and uses British cant (“The niff that bloke sent off…”). He also replaces all mention of “man,” “woman,” “human” and “dog” with, respectively, “male,” “female,” “Wug” or “Wugmort,” and “canine,” as in: “a male had killed his female for no cause other than he was a vile Wug” and “I didn’t like my stuff male-handled.” Despite these efforts, this is all familiar territory, from the isolated town with secretive leaders bent on preserving the status quo to violent visions, hidden rooms and libraries, characters with ambiguous agendas, a hot-tempered teen protagonist with nascent magical powers and three magical tools that practically fall into her hands. There’s even a ring. With some perfunctory martial training from her boyfriend, Vega Jane improbably defeats several ravening monsters as well as a string of much larger and more experienced males, then flies off over the town walls to have future adventures.
Like many crossover efforts from name-brand authors: overstuffed and underinspired. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-65220-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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