While the subject matter is dark and at times raw, the message of the strength of the human spirit is ultimately uplifting.
Book 2 in the middle-grade Book of Storms trilogy.
Twelve-year-old Danny O’Neill’s life is miserable. His horrific nightmares have left him skittish, fearful, and without friends. That is, until he meets the tough, unswerving Cath Carrera, a girl who has known no kindness and expects none. Running away from her abusive father, Cath encounters a hare named Barshin who tells her that she is a tela: a being who can talk to other creatures. Barshin then briefly takes her to Chromos, a world created by dreams and imagination. Once home in England, Cath is desperate to return to Chromos, the only world of beauty that she has known, but Barshin tells her that he will only lead her back again if she gets the message to Danny—a schoolmate—that Danny’s cousin Tom is in great danger of being swallowed up by Sammael, the dark entity in Book 1 who trades wishes for souls. Cath delivers the message, but Danny wants none of it, scarred as he is by his last encounter with Sammael. Pitting Danny’s fear against Cath’s fearlessness, Hatfield once again spins a complex, action-filled story that is buoyed with mythology and keenly observed depictions of the natural world. Danny is a middle-class white boy; Cath is a lower-class girl who endures taunts that her mother is a “Gypsy.”
While the subject matter is dark and at times raw, the message of the strength of the human spirit is ultimately uplifting. (Fantasy. 11-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-001-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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