An entertaining novel of magical heists driven by deeply appealing characters.
In the third book of The Arcadia Project series, Baker (Phantom Pains, 2017, etc.) raises the stakes for an engaging heroine, who wrestles with physical disability and mental illness.
We return to Millie Roper and the covert organization she works for in the middle of a crisis. The Arcadia Project monitors and controls the interactions between the human world and the magical parallel reality of the fey. These interactions have fueled human inspiration and progress throughout history, so when the Arcadia Project splinters into an internal war, with Millie’s Los Angeles office rebelling against the brutal policies of the Project’s London headquarters, it puts both worlds in danger. The pressure crushes everyone on the Los Angeles team, with Millie in particular ruthlessly battered by her borderline personality disorder, but when London HQ tries to frame her partner for murder, she comes up with a dangerous plan to both save him and break London’s worldwide control. The plan is quickly entangled with conflicts among fey royalty, a movement to free enslaved spirits, and complicated love. The action rarely takes a breath as the characters dash from one predicament to another in worlds that are so saturated with magic and conflict that the high-speed drama feels pleasurably inevitable. There’s a cinematic joy in the brisk revelations and switchbacks of the plot, but even more impressive are Baker’s sympathetic and difficult characters. Millie’s physical struggles as a double amputee are a seamless part of the character, important and sensitively portrayed, but never a stunt. Her BPD is treated with similar frankness, grace, and even humor. Each of Baker’s characters acts in ways that are sometimes better and sometimes much worse than you expect, but their complications give the novel’s magical elements the heft of reality.
An entertaining novel of magical heists driven by deeply appealing characters.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5194-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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