Ambitious, entertaining start to a sexy YA paranormal adventure series.
In this debut fantasy novel, after family tragedy, college-age Sage Frankle discovers her supernatural capabilities and bloodline legacy.
Sage stands numb in front of a casket. She recently lost her mom to cancer, and now her stepfather’s friend David has died of unexpected heart failure. Her stepfather, off the wagon and wild with grief, tries to strangle her, and Sage’s world goes black. Before she knows it, her stepfather is in an alcohol treatment center, and she has put her college classes on hold to live with her aunt Ilia at the latter’s inn in another part of Vermont. Sage goes for counseling but is too depressed, too scared to delve deep. She doesn’t remember what happened with David, but she seems to read others’ thoughts and has been having odd dreams. Her cousin Lilly, who had left for a trip around the time of David’s demise, returns home, drawing to the surface the dark energy lurking throughout the inn. Sage either sees or imagines Lilly in bondage sex with the local “Playboy Chef,” who is then weakened by a mystery illness. Handsome, angelic Lucien, whom Lilly treats as her master, arrives on the scene, as do Tate, a sweet, nerdy mythology major and son of the ailing chef, and Desden, Sage’s gay tattoo artist best friend from home. As Sage’s strange behavior escalates, Ilia finally explains all, and the group bands together to deal with the girls’ powers and the “portal” gateway of the inn. To launch this planned series of tales focused on these alluring young women, debut author Hampton sets up a diverse cast of players and a solid, believable back story that draws from Jewish folklore. Some of the characters, such as a crime writer who’s a frequent guest at the inn, are rather awkwardly introduced, perhaps to be further developed in future installments. Overall, however, Hampton conjures a heady blend of eroticism, fantasy, humor and coming-of-age angst that should appeal to both Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans.
Ambitious, entertaining start to a sexy YA paranormal adventure series.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615964560
Page Count: 360
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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