A bewitching tale of love across centuries.
When Xanthe Westlake and her mother, Flora—who's been blindsided by a nasty divorce—leave London to purchase an antiques shop in Marlborough, a 17th-century silver key belt, or chatelaine, begins to sing to Xanthe, pulling her into a time-traveling mission to save a wrongly accused servant girl.
Xanthe, gifted with psychometry, sometimes feels an emotional tug from the antiques she and Flora sell. Yet no artifact has sung so loudly and insistently as the chatelaine. As Xanthe clears the gardens behind their store, she discovers that the chatelaine’s energy increases the closer she moves toward a strange, rounded building, which turns out to be a blind house, a jail for suspected criminals awaiting trial. Local legend says the blind house sits at the intersection of two powerful ley lines. Although Xanthe is curious about the ley lines, the overwhelming sense of anguish in the blind house concerns her until she begins to be harassed by the ghost of Margaret Merton, a woman burned at the stake for Catholic beliefs. Mistress Merton desperately needs Xanthe to use the chatelaine and blind house to travel back in time to save the life of Alice, a maidservant accused of theft. Once she falls back in time, however, Xanthe’s task is complicated by the difficult machinations of a legal system that undercuts the poor, not to mention the possibilities of love with Samuel Appleby, a talented architect drawn to Xanthe’s unconventional ways. Attentive to historical detail as well as beautifully delineated scenes, Brackston (The Return of the Witch, 2016, etc.) has crafted rich characters with plausible concerns: Xanthe is not simply a time-traveling woman in search of love; she has wrongfully suffered jail time herself because of her no-good, drug-addicted ex-boyfriend and worries for her feisty yet arthritic mother, saddled with frozen bank accounts. Fans of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander collection will delight in Brackston’s new series and eagerly await its second installment.
A bewitching tale of love across centuries.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-07243-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
A new series starts off with a bang.
A queen and her young daughter are forced to separate and go into hiding when a corrupt politician tries to take over the kingdom.
Queen Cressa of Weirandale is worried about her 8-year-old daughter, the “princella” Cerúlia. The people of Weirandale worship a water spirit, Nargis, who grants each queen a special gift called a Talent. Cressa herself is able to meddle with memories, for example, and her mother possessed supernatural strategic abilities that served her well in battle. Cerúlia, however, appears to have none, because surely her insistence that she can talk to animals is only her young imagination running wild. When Cerúlia’s many pets warn her about assassins creeping into the royal chambers, the girl is able to save herself and her mother. Cressa uses her Talent, which actually extends to forcing anyone to tell her the truth, to root out traitors among the aristocracy, led by the power-hungry Lord Matwyck. Fearing for her daughter’s life and her own, Cressa takes Cerúlia and flees. Thinking Cerúlia will be safer away from her mother, Cressa takes the girl to a kind peasant family and adjusts their memories so they believe Cerúlia is their adopted daughter. Kozloff’s debut is the first of four Nine Realms books, and Tor plans to publish them over just four months. Luckily, the series opener is a strong start, so readers will be grateful for the short wait before Book 2. Kozloff sets a solid stage with glimpses into other characters and nations while keeping the book together with a clear, propulsive plot.
A new series starts off with a bang.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-16854-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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