by Nicole Burr ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 13, 2013
The maiden installment of this fantasy saga mainly sets the stage for future clashing and questing.
In Burr’s fantasy debut, an unassuming young woman learns she’s the inheritor of mighty “magick”—and a key figure in the war between good and evil.
The kickoff to Burr’s multivolume fantasy series introduces 20-year-old Esra, a seemingly ordinary peasant in the kingdom of LeVara. It’s not long before she learns that her entire life has been a lie for her own protection. LeVara, far from its appearance as a sleepy land under an apathetic king, has long been a simmering battleground for opposing armies of mages: the heroic Keepers and the evil Elites. The latter are the sorcerer-descendants of a fiendish usurper from centuries past; they’re back after a breakthrough in “magick” R&D helped the villains swell their ranks with orclike mutant soldiers. Esra, who thought herself a clumsy country orphan, is really the daughter of powerful Keeper wizards; she’s a chosen-one type, destined to free LeVara from tyranny. Once Esra’s identity becomes known to the Elites, the Keepers snatch her up to give her a crash course in magickal ground rules, combat techniques and culture. She strives to rally the fearsome but reluctant nonhuman civilizations to join the Keepers’ cause. Though some details are interesting—Burr imagines an enchanted app that can make one’s own skin become a kind of MapQuest and text-message display—these expository passages begin to read like laundry lists, perhaps in anticipation of the series’ future installments. The idea of a female heroic-fantasy protagonist is far from the novelty it once was, and Esra is a plucky but generally nondescript lead; even as the narrative puts her through her first taste of battle and bloodshed, she remains rather bland. Despite lots of flirtatious, hunky Keepers hovering in Esra’s orbit, no overt romance beckons the heroine in this volume. But Burr’s narrative moves at a solid pace, and the author lays the groundwork properly. With these preliminaries out of the way, the next installments hint at grand action in the Tolkien tradition.
The maiden installment of this fantasy saga mainly sets the stage for future clashing and questing.Pub Date: April 13, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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