This is a fantasy premise with great potential, but too much experimentation doesn’t allow it to thrive.
On their shared 18th birthday, four half sisters, who’ve only met in a dream world, must fight to the death to appease their demonic father, the nefarious Wilhelm Grimm.
Cambridge residents Goldie, Scarlet, Bea, and Liyana don’t remember meeting each other in their childhood dreams of visiting Everwhere. They don’t remember the immense powers they possessed there—powers of earth, air, water, and fire. Indeed, they have no idea they have sisters or who their father really is. But as their 18th birthday fast approaches, their powers begin to manifest in the real world. Their father’s soldiers, fallen stars disguised as men forever destined to hunt “Grimm Girls,” soon close in on their quarries. Only Leo, who inexplicably finds himself falling for Goldie, questions the point of this battle between good and evil and if he can bring himself to kill Goldie, thereby sacrificing himself. As each girl is drawn to one another, to their hunters, and to Everwhere, they must choose a path of light or darkness. The winner of the battle, as far as Grimm is concerned, will help him shape the dark fate of the mortal world. This tale is van Praag’s (The Dress Shop of Dreams, 2014, etc.) first attempt at a fantasy epic and, unlike her previous work, suffers from a muddled premise, vague stakes that don’t become clear until halfway through the book, and narration-induced whiplash. She jumps too quickly between several out-of-sequence chronologies and many different characters’ points of view. Meanwhile, the reader can't be sure who is actually telling this story—Goldie, who narrates some sections in first person, an omniscient narrator who sometimes talks to “you,” or whomever is telling the other characters’ sections from a third-person-limited perspective. On worldbuilding alone, van Praag’s atmospheric prose, intriguing premise, and diverse cast of characters receive high marks, but fantasy isn’t just about worldbuilding. There simply isn’t enough time spent with each character for readers to connect with them. Being cagey about key story elements does this plot a disservice as well. And while it’s admirable that van Praag tackles themes of surviving child abuse, violence, and sexual assault, along with caring for grandparents and parents with mental illnesses, they sadly often get lost in the meandering narrative.
This is a fantasy premise with great potential, but too much experimentation doesn’t allow it to thrive.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293246-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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