A methodically complex series opener that should satisfy Hogwarts fans.
This YA fantasy debut finds a teenager imbued with the power of a goddess from Norse mythology.
In Wreathen, Delaware, 13-year-old Amanda West is about to enjoy a winter field trip with her history class. She boards the bus and runs into bully Laurie Gellar. When the petty Ms. Biggs, a history teacher, tries to check Amanda’s permission slip, the girl finds it’s missing. She spies Laurie tossing the wet slip out of the bus window, but Ms. Biggs won’t hear any excuses. Amanda misses the trip, and her parents keep her home from the town’s Winter Festival for being so unruly. Luckily, Amanda’s classmate and best friend, Jack Isen, skips the field trip to cheer her up. As they build a snow spider outside, strange creatures appear. They are led by Bergelmir, Lord of the Frost Jotuns (or giants), who refers to Amanda as “Favoured.” This means that she’s been selected to channel the “magick” of an Asgardian deity while a spell by the Norns (Norse goddesses of Fate) quells the fires of Ragnarok. Yet the Jotuns can’t kidnap Amanda once the heroic Lady Freyja joins the battle. The goddess spirits Amanda off to Asgard on a rainbow bridge, where she learns that her patron deity is none other than Sigyn, Loki’s wife and traitor to the realm. Bryan’s series opener brings Norse mythology to a Harry Potter–style school environment. And where Marvel’s Thor comics and films cherry-pick Asgardian lore, here readers get a much denser experience. Even Ginnungagap, the void in which the Nine Realms were born, is mentioned. Strong characters like Cassie, Amanda’s fellow Favoured, guide the protagonist when her parents are transformed into mice and Jack has been taken by Bergelmir. A larger mystery shapes up as harmful “alfblot,” or Fell Elf magick, begins appearing in Asgard. Amanda’s temptation to reach out to the imprisoned Sigyn is an intriguing plot driver. Eventually, the fantasy staple of a powerful ring, in this case, Draupnir, comes into play. A game-changing final moment will energize fans for the sequel.
A methodically complex series opener that should satisfy Hogwarts fans.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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