A character-based fantasy tale that’s more concerned with questions of the heart than scenes of action.
A troubled teen escapes the chaos of her foster home for another realm in this YA fantasy.
Seventeen-year-old Kori Castleman is on Christmas break from school. She’s the foster child of Matthew and Tabitha Price, who own a ranch in rural Colorado. Kori loathes her foster mother, who drinks heavily and physically abuses her. One day, the teen has another terrible argument with an inebriated Tabitha, who tries to cut Kori’s hair with scissors. A wrestling match ensues, and Kori punches the woman out cold. The teen’s revenge is sweeter, however, when the Drug Enforcement Administration finds out that the Prices have been growing marijuana illegally on their property. However, Kori hadn’t reckoned with the involvement of local drug cartels. When violent men come to collect cash that Matthew owes them, the ranch becomes the site of a gun battle. After killing a man to save her own life, Kori flees on an all-terrain vehicle. In the night sky, she sees a strange light; suddenly, a “flashing door” hangs in the air, and she goes through it. Kori awakens surrounded by sand on a planet with two suns. Her wandering leads her to a “pygmy mammoth” whom she names “Chewie.” Eventually, dust clouds appear in the distance—evidence of a wild horse roundup by Prince K’tar of Kaldura. His people, led by Queen Arliss, aren’t surprised by Kori’s appearance. Indeed, they call her “Daughter of the Sky”—and they have plans for her. Sexton uses the fantasy device of a portal between worlds not to complicate Kori’s life, but to simplify it. The teen manages to stay grounded in her new surroundings by playing pop songs that she’d downloaded to her phone. Yet the connections to her former life as an abused teen keep her adrift and uncertain in K’tar’s society. When a Seer presents Kori with tales of a startling, violent future, the author seems to offer her protagonist a straightforward road to heroism. But then a stranger named Kazmer tosses this aside, telling Kori that Seers are false, and that chasing her predicted fate will inevitably lead to her death. Sexton then has Kori find her own way by training with an elder named Taluth to become a Rider, bonded to a telepathic Spirit Horse. He asks her, “Why live a life where you know all the answers?” The story shows how embracing uncertainty and thriving in the moment help Kori navigate her emotions. However, hanging over these proceedings is the potential for her to return through a doorway to a familiar but miserable home. The worldbuilding in this novel is rather slight, although the Spirit Horses Sorliss and Rhonan will help scratch readers’ fantasy itch. Comedy relief comes during culture-clash moments, as when Kori speaks slang to the horses (“You’re shading, brah”). The finale, which is as jubilant as the opening scenes are grim, sets up further adventures in potential sequels.
A character-based fantasy tale that’s more concerned with questions of the heart than scenes of action.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 455
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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