Equally appealing back story and characters make a sequel to this novel about an animal spirit something to look forward to.
A teen descendant of a tribe cursed by an ancient creature may be the one who can save his bloodline in this horror tale.
When Sean Wolf’s parents send him to stay with Grandma Elizabeth in the San Juan Islands, it’s certainly not a vacation. They’ve effectively banned him from their home, believing Sean deliberately set a fire that injured his father, Henry. Elizabeth thinks Sean may have done it subconsciously, protecting his family with magic. Mom Mary saw the raven mark in the fire, the calling card of the Grishla, an animal spirit that the Dwanake tribe attempted to enslave centuries ago. Taking the form of a Velociraptor-esque Deinonychus, the Grishla targets tribe scions in retaliation. But there’s good news: a second mark (the number 13) means Sean broke the Grishla’s spell, convincing Elizabeth he’s the Ultra-Witch, powerful enough to fight the creature. Elizabeth gradually relays this to her grandson so she can begin training him to perfect his witchcraft. But she keeps mum about the “hideous experiments” on children to create an Ultra-Witch—which remain mysterious even to readers. Sean, meanwhile, makes a few friends: Jimmy Cooper, Tom Wright, and Bear. A night of camping in the woods sounds like fun, but it’s unfortunately a prime spot for the Grishla to attack. Gray (New England: Weird, 2016, etc.) delivers suspense throughout: Sean dreams of Civil War ancestor Srinam Srinivasan (and his wife and child) being pursued by the monster, while recurrent red eyes indicate its proximity to various people. But the exposition also offers engaging character development. Sean, for example, regrets tormenting Mary, buying books on black magic just to agitate her. The teens’ dynamic is likewise solid, with churchgoing Jimmy struggling to forgive allegedly reformed bully Tom, responsible for Jimmy’s hellish treatment in school. Gray spends a little too much time on Elizabeth’s vegan cooking, with Sean excessively gushing over portobello mushroom French dip sandwiches. But there’s plenty of meat—vegan or not—to the plot, delving into the tribe’s history as well as Mary’s; her strong Christian beliefs may stem from escaping black magic in her own lineage. The ending drops a nice twist and setup for Book 2.
Equally appealing back story and characters make a sequel to this novel about an animal spirit something to look forward to.Pub Date: March 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5305-0808-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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