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
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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