A charming, uplifting paranormal romance.
Cash’s (Risen: The Battle for Darracia, 2014, etc.) romance novel finds a divorcée tangling with a sea captain’s ghost.
Remy Galway has just moved into a white cottage in Cold Spring Harbor on New York’s Long Island. The yoga instructor is starting over there with her 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, after a bitter separation from her volatile ex-husband, Scott. Their cottage, built during the town’s whaling heyday in the early 1700s, has a detailed mural on one wall, featuring a bearded sea captain named Eli Gaspar. Olivia senses that someone is watching her and her mother, but Remy is initially skeptical. It’s the ghost of crotchety Eli, however, who wants both of them gone—along with their feminine frippery—and he destroys the cottage’s parlor to scare them off. But Remy assumes that Scott is responsible for the destruction. She takes comfort in the soothing presence of Hugh Matthews, a handsome museum curator, who’s there for Remy as her life takes several increasingly dangerous turns (including arson at her yoga studio). As Eli watches Remy and Olivia, two mysterious sentinels, who keep spirits from physically harming the living, are watching him—but the captain seems too angry to appease. Can Remy and Hugh learn enough about Eli’s tragedy to avoid one of their own? Cash delivers another emotionally rich haunted-house tale, filled with tantalizing history and Long Island color. He even addresses the whaling industry, as when Eli asks his wife in a flashback, “Like reading late into the evening? Whale oil is progress, Sarah mine.” The story is also often quite funny; Remy thinks Hugh is too perfect, for example; she “expected bluebirds and butterflies to hover over his head while angels sang.” Hugh is far from flawless, however, as his awkward declaration of love for Remy proves: “[W]hen I saw you, it was like...I don’t know...pow!” The supernatural and romantic elements seesaw back and forth nicely, and the historical scenes enliven both aspects. In the end, when Eli says to a model whale, “I didn’t understand about loss, you poor beast,” he nearly steals the show.
A charming, uplifting paranormal romance.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500600365
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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