by M.A. Harper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
Harper might have had better luck by sticking to the real travails of blended family life. Her spooks often amount to simple...
In her third outing, southern writer Harper (The Worst Day of My Life, So Far, 2001, etc.) attempts an old-fashioned ghost story set in modern-day New Orleans.
Things start out on a sunny note: Newlyweds Philip Randazzo, five-star chef and owner of Tasso Restaurant, and his beautiful bride, the lovely blonde anthropologist Michelle, sit down to a breakfast prepared for them by Michelle’s teenaged son Cam. But why is the cat freaking out? And why does it make an intolerable fuss whenever the happy couple enjoy conjugal relations? After a strange teenaged boy appears on the stairs during Thanksgiving dinner, Philip suspects the truth: The family is being haunted by Michelle’s former husband, the moderately famous Cajun musician A.P. Savoie, who was killed in a car accident three years before. Michelle, having been through some wacky spiritual experiences in the Yucatan, is game to accept this explanation. Things get weirder. The family ghost appears in visions and dreams, makes a phone call, leaves a note through a video-game screen and even has a sexual experience with the lady of the house via the Jacuzzi in the master bedroom. (What did ghosts do without modern conveniences?) Philip gets jealous, and the two men, the living and the undead, jostle for the role of patriarch. Philip asks advice from an Anne Rice–like novelist, the couple consult a medium (who works by day in the personnel department of the local newspaper) and dally with exorcism (performed by Philip’s brother Dominic, a Catholic priest). They decide the ghostly conduit is a Zippo lighter. They get rid of it. Things calm down. But there’s one last ghostly episode to go, when Savoie returns to aid the most unlikely family member of all.
Harper might have had better luck by sticking to the real travails of blended family life. Her spooks often amount to simple silliness—and her menfolks’ relentless macho posturing often makes one yearn for divine intervention.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101116-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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by Leigh Bardugo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2019
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
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New York Times Bestseller
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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by Kevin Hearne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2020
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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