An often entertaining but usually uninvolving spirit-quest fantasy.
A schlub spends many lives figuring out where he went wrong in this lightweight reincarnation adventure.
Manus, a crass, slightly bigoted 41-year-old CPA, has a great relationship with his Corvette, but almost none with his wife and kids. When he’s killed in a collision with a Sikh ice-cream-truck driver, he finds himself adrift in the afterlife with his wisecracking great-grandmother, Oma, assigned as his “spirit sherpa” to guide him toward enlightenment. She might also be an ancient Hun warrior. Manus’ spiritual curriculum requires him to be reborn as a series of characters, including a Polish Jew packed off to Auschwitz in a cattle car, an African-American ex-con trying to spruce up an inner-city park, and a teenage Australian girl out for a glorious day’s surfing. In each scene, a life lesson is learned (love God, love your community, love the waves), after which a swift demise (shot by Nazi, stabbed by punk, chomped by shark) sends Manus’s spirit on to a new vessel. In between incarnations, Manus and Oma hang out on the Other Side, a paradise where he receives personal-growth tutorials from Albert Einstein, Elvis and Wilt Chamberlain. The author pens a half-serious, half-farcical picaresque that’s a kaleidoscope of well-observed bits of history, sketchy philosophical musings and jokey supernatural whimsy. There are a few funny vignettes, including a raucous marital spat between Manus and his widow conducted through a put-upon psychic medium. There are also many draggy passages of New Age catechism: “You learn from each life, you evolve, becom[ing] more attuned with the universal force,” says an “amorphous spirit.” The novel’s center lies in Manus’ experiences of moral crises in lives unfamiliar to him; the most substantial of these, like the story of an Iraqi romance that crosses hostile sectarian boundaries, achieve real emotional depth. Unfortunately, the ongoing reincarnation device ushers Manus on so glibly that the various characters’ life-and-death traumas—and the lessons they are meant to impart—lose their dramatic force.
An often entertaining but usually uninvolving spirit-quest fantasy.Pub Date: May 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470056902
Page Count: 172
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.
A doughboy makes a curious discovery at the front in this inventive metaphysical horror tale.
This novel by Kraus centers on Private Cyril Bagger, a U.S. soldier during World War I and the son of a bishop who died on the Lusitania; he’s taken his father’s Bible with him into the Army as a remembrance. He’s also a confidence man and shirker relegated to burial duty in the French countryside, which is fine with him: The work is grotesque (Kraus depicts wartime deaths in visceral detail) but keeps him from becoming a corpse himself. Alas, his commander has hand-picked him and four other “disreputable” soldiers for a suicide mission to rescue what sounds like an incessantly shrieking soldier. Cyril finds the source of the shrieking, which turns out to be—well, that’s tricky. Cyril sees her as a vaguely familiar woman, clothed in red and blue, bathed in bright light, and capable of magically rescuing him from the worst of German gunfire; members of his cohort see a mother, a former lover, and other women. So for the purposes of Kraus’ novel, the shrieker is a metaphor for the ways war stands in contrast to our deepest needs for care and safety. It’s a sweet sentiment, albeit one that Kraus coats in a lot of ugliness, particularly the seemingly endless human carnage. Kraus structures the novel as an extended run-on sentence (with paragraph breaks), giving the story a relentless and intense rhythm. As a veteran horror writer, he’s gifted at depictions of blood and guts and knows how to keep a story moving, but in its latter stages the novel is a philosophical one as well, concerned with humanity’s seemingly inborn need to wage war and what might counter it. The identity of the woman Cyril calls an angel is vague, but Kraus has a clear grasp on our worst impulses.
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068458
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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