A bracing combination of bureaucracy bashing and mystical mystery.
A system meant to help two young, orphaned brothers fails them in this paranormal thriller by the author of In Strictest Confidence (2017).
In 1968, fraternal twins Wayne and Mateo McBride become orphans at age 7 when their drug addict father, just out of prison, shoots and kills their addict mother. The authorities send the boys to the Bronx Children’s Shelter, their first stop in New York’s social services bureaucracy. Wayne is an angry tough guy while Mateo is a sensitive “wimp” (though he has a protector in his alter, Mark, an alternate self who comes out whenever Mateo feels threatened). Over the next few weeks, they meet the people with who will affect their fates. These include Jimmy Lee, a fledgling child welfare worker; Dr. Antonio Perez, an overworked child psychiatrist; and Bill Hael, at first a guard at the shelter and later a homicide detective. Perez makes the fateful decision to separate the twins. Wayne gets placed with a foster mother who is secretly a drug addict, and he later becomes a drug lord after spending time in a boys’ detention center. A loving couple takes in Mateo, and he flourishes, becoming a tennis star, a pharmaceutical executive, and a politician. But detective Hael is haunted by dreams he can’t explain, and just when readers think they know where the book is going, it takes a sharp turn. A psychologist and Bronx native, Canzoniero has counseled abused children, teenage drug addicts, and adult alcoholics, and his familiarity with the underfunded world of social services—and its heartbreaking mistakes—is apparent. Wayne and Mateo needed everything to go right if they were to become productive members of society, and things go wrong for them from the start as Canzoniero takes what could have been just a screed about bureaucratic bungling and gives it a twist, resulting in a lively paranormal thriller. Like all good thrillers, this one keeps readers guessing.
A bracing combination of bureaucracy bashing and mystical mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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