An intriguing but uneven tale of two families.
A novel focuses on the mystical lineage of a golden cross.
Cassidy winds a highly complex historical fiction tale around the stories of two families, each of which is connected in some way to an ancient golden cross. The bulk of the narrative’s early sections involves long, expository conversations between David Michael Sonneman and a stand-in for the author named Ronan Cassidy. These chats range over large swaths of European and American history, with a particular emphasis running throughout the entire book on the machinations of Western financial institutions. The narrative follows David and his sister, Nadie; Ronan; their descendants; and the people in their orbits through major periods of history, including the Crusades and the Spanish Empire, always touching on the survival of that golden cross but usually broadening to explore the money situations of every era. This leads to a lot of exposition about the Federal Reserve, the gold standard, the nature of inflation, and the activities of the United States Treasury. “By 1980,” one such passage goes, “the purely fiat reserve currency known as the dollar was fully supported internationally on three major fronts: The excess dollars created through the continuing US trade deficit were being mopped up by the central banks in the form of Treasury purchases by the trade surplus nations, in effect sterilizing the dilutive effects of those excess dollars.” As the plot follows the Sonneman and Cassidy families, the true nature of the golden cross is gradually disclosed.
In this series opener, author Cassidy deftly offers steadily mounting revelations while tracing the journeys of the two families. The bones of his richly detailed story are captivating and will appeal to die-hard fantasy fans. But the author writes most of this material in turgid prose. In addition, there is virtually no action or even plot motion in the work, and most of the characters sound the same, talking like 19th-century theater actors. At one point, Ronan asserts: “I speak to you with certainty, good Sir. I say further that no man who truly believes would follow such a darkened path and embrace the feelings of absolute loss that accompany obtaining a personal kingdom of any size appropriated through acts of injustice upon this earth.” Another passage focusing on a character simply called “the man” goes: “I do believe that I understand your intent, Mr. Cassidy. Yet perhaps you do not fully understand the certainty of the response which is required by your reply per the terms of our agreement, an agreement entered into amongst honorable friends.” The only thing that could rescue such stiff writing would be a fantastically original story, and there are few hints of that in these pages. Instead, the tale delivers a fairly standard, mystic-MacGuffin plotline of a type readers will have encountered many times, starting with the novels by Dan Brown. This book’s plot can’t do much against lines like “The boy reached down purposefully and once again delicately parted away the last and the tangled strands of her matted hair that had somehow failed to clear her cheeks and forehead when he tended to her earlier.”
An intriguing but uneven tale of two families.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66553-514-4
Page Count: 648
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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