A solid series opener that hits its genre marks while also providing colorful imagery.
A high school girl discovers that she has superpowers and a world-saving destiny in this paranormal YA novel.
Faith McDaniels, a 17-year-old senior, is starting over in a new town. Her mother died three months ago; she never knew her father, and now her unsympathetic older brother, Eddie, makes the rules. Faith is visited in her dreams by an “exotic and perfect,” olive-skinned girl with a singsong voice, mysteriously offering to show Faith “the way.” One day, as Faith tries to enjoy some ordinary, adolescent mischief with old friends, she’s drawn into a strange new world. The dream-girl is there, along with a crowd of elders who say that they need Faith’s help: “Without it our worlds will be overtaken….Continue your mother’s legacy, be a protector of both our worlds.” Faith agrees and gets lessons in drawing energy—which she nicknames “En”—from living creatures and “translating” it, and herself, into different forms; meanwhile, her enemy wants to harvest all living energy for himself. He engineers a confrontation with Faith, using her friends, including the boy she loves, as hostages. What does he want from Faith? And will she be able to control her powers in time to save her friends, herself, and two worlds? In her fiction debut, Reynoso (Do You, 2013) draws on well-worn tropes in fantasy YA fiction: a teenager with magical abilities who’s fated to rescue humanity from a shadowy opponent; the same heroine presented with two romantic choices; and overwrought, high-octane emotions. Still, Reynoso writes about them vividly, offering some original, striking images. Faith’s dream visitor, for example, has “a pink hibiscus bush growing from the top of her head with one flower tucked behind her right ear, and her body is…painted to mimic a bold-print sarong.” Faith’s realistic friendships help anchor her and provide an effective contrast to the paranormal sections while also helping to establish what’s at stake. That said, the excessive use of hyphens sometimes distracts: “enough clarity in-the-moment, enough knowing right-from-wrong.”
A solid series opener that hits its genre marks while also providing colorful imagery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 363
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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