A story sometimes difficult to digest, but readers will want to sink their teeth into this enchanted tale.
In Peers’ debut fantasy novel, a young woman who may be the descendant of mythic priestesses heads north in search of her destiny.
While visiting England, Samuel Alexander finds a ring he believes to be sacred. Years later, Samuel dies, bestowing upon Sophie, his 8-year-old granddaughter, the ring and a journal he kept to detail the ring’s connection to Ogham, the mystical Tree Alphabet. After young Sophie is visited—in what seems to be a dream—by Nimue, a High Priestess of Avalon, a cataclysmic event causes an older Sophie to take the ring and Samuel’s journal on a trek, ultimately seeking help from Jack, an old friend of her mother’s and a former psychiatrist who lost his license due to his unorthodox methods. It’s here that Sophie acts as a vessel, transforming into nine priestesses trapped in the forest, each of whom await the fulfillment of a prophecy—a union to reveal the wisdom of the trees. The priestesses often speak in metaphors and rarely provide clear answers, as in the response to Jack when he asks for a name: “I have many names, and I have no name.” The intricate plot takes some getting used to, but it rewards readers with dramatic, expressive prose. The author doesn’t waste a single character; they each play their part, even Sophie’s mother, Eleni. Lilli, Jack’s “spirit sister” (she claims to have adopted him a year before), is the book’s unparalleled character. She’s a shape-shifter—spending a good deal of the novel as Coyote—and her insight into the mythical elements is greater than anyone else’s. Sophie’s constant transformations and a seemingly ever-present dark force, which is eventually personified, keep the story at an elevated unease. Fortunately, Peers relieves some of the pressure with appropriate bits of subtle humor: a young Sophie draws symbols on her skin; and Lilli, Eleni and Sophie separately visit a hospitalized Jack, much to the receptionist’s chagrin.
A story sometimes difficult to digest, but readers will want to sink their teeth into this enchanted tale.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460907276
Page Count: 386
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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