An enjoyable fantasy mystery that tackles physical disability and mental illness without sacrificing diverting, fast-paced...
In a debut novel that promises to be the first volume of an engaging urban fantasy series, Baker introduces a hard-edged but appealing heroine and a version of Los Angeles that pairs Hollywood with a magical parallel world.
Millicent Roper lost both her legs and her aspirations for a career in film after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. She installs herself in a psychiatric facility in Los Angeles, fading under the burden of borderline personality disorder and a surfeit of associated unhappiness, until a mysterious stranger offers her a job at the Arcadia Project. Jerked out of her self-imposed inertia, Millie discovers that magic—real, world-warping magic—exists and that her prospective employers are part of a shady organization charged with regulating traffic between the human and fairy worlds. Her introduction to this strange reality offers the reader plenty of comforting entertainment, despite the fact that the Arcadia Project is staffed by former psychiatric patients, often troubled and unpredictable. Millie meets a host of appealing, oddball characters and finds herself embroiled in a conspiracy with elements of Hollywood glamour, gritty mystery, and lavish fairy-tale magic. The plot trundles along at a pleasant clip, and the story is easy to keep reading, though it sometimes layers so many unlikely incidents that it strains credibility even in a world stuffed with the fantastical. Millie, brash and volatile, crashes through and pulls everything along in her wake. Though often waylaid by the troubles of her mind and difficulties of her body, Millie’s stubborn insistence on survival and frequent matter-of-fact dissections of her problems manage to provoke fondness instead of pity. She faces catastrophic damage and carries on with the verve, sarcasm, and decency that bode well for a developing series.
An enjoyable fantasy mystery that tackles physical disability and mental illness without sacrificing diverting, fast-paced storytelling.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5306-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
