A page-turning horror story with a few legitimate shocks and plenty of angst.
Set against the backdrop of the modern American South, Reese’s supernatural coming-of-age tale brims with horror and revenge.
It’s Lydia Cantrell’s 10th birthday, and her wealthy family has thrown a party for the kids of Sherman’s March, Ga. While the children are having a good time, Lydia’s father, Frank, is held up on his way to the event by a mysterious young girl to whom he offers a ride. After the party, with indefinable evil lurking inside him, Frank rapes his daughter. The novel then jumps forward two years to the summer before Lydia’s freshman year of high school. Lydia, now shy and academic, dons a teenage goth style, and her father still sexually abuses her with regularity. Her mother drugs herself to escape the hellish existence that life has become for the Cantrells. Though mocked by her peers and tormented by her family, Lydia has one bright spot in life—Michael, with whom she has a blossoming though tentative romance. However, as the young heroine turns to self-harm and Marilyn Manson as a means of escape, she makes a startling discovery: someone, or something, has given her the ability to control fire. Diary entries from the 19th century, written by one of Lydia’s relatives, are spliced into the text in a relatively weak effort to impart some sense of Southern history to the work. These sections, mostly concerned with the rage of a forgotten lover in the antebellum South, mirror Lydia’s darker story and provide the reader with a historical precedent of the family’s pyrokinetic ability. Occasionally, distracting lines—“That was the Lydia he loved, not Crabzilla the PMS Princess”—crop up to provide neither comic relief nor add any realism to the character’s mentalities; the result causes the short narrative to stumble as it trots along to a familiar-feeling finale. But there are some admirable qualities: For all its faults, the horror story will have readers eagerly turning pages to see just how Lydia’s revenge will play out. The truly shocking moments come early in the text, though, and a tendency to stray too far from the already short narrative may bother readers who feel that the extremely weighty issues raised aren’t given enough care or concern from an emotional or psychological standpoint.
A page-turning horror story with a few legitimate shocks and plenty of angst.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.
A novel tells the story of two spirited girls who set out to save a lame foal in 1952.
Mary, age 12, lacks muscle control of her legs and must use a wheelchair. Her life is constantly interrupted by trips with her widower father to assorted doctors, all of whom have failed to help her. Mary tolerates the treatments, hoping to one day walk unassisted, but her true passion involves horses. Possessing a library filled with horse books, she loves watching and drawing the animals at a neighboring farm. She longs to own one herself. But her father, overprotective due to her disability and his own lingering grief over Mary’s dead mother, makes her keep her distance. Mary befriends Laura, the emotionally neglected daughter of the wealthy neighboring farm owners, and the two share secret buggy rides. Both girls are attracted to Illusion, a beautiful red bay filly on the farm. Mary learns that Illusion is to be put down by a veterinarian because of a lame leg. Horrified, she decides to talk to the barn manager about the horse (“Isn’t it okay for her to live even if she’s not perfect? I think she deserves a chance”). Soon, Mary and Laura attempt to raise money to save Illusion. At the same time, Mary begins to gain control of her legs thanks to water therapy and secret therapeutic riding with Laura. There is indeed a great deal of poignancy in a story of a girl with a disability fighting to defend the intrinsic value of a lame animal. But this book, the first installment of the Dream Horse Adventure Series, would be twice as touching if Mary interacted with Illusion more. In the tale’s opening, she watches the foal from afar, but she actually spends very little time with the filly she tries so hard to protect. This turns out to be a strange development given the degree to which the narrative relies on her devotion. Count (Selah’s Sweet Dream, 2015) draws Mary and Laura in broad but believable strokes, defined mainly by their unrelenting pluckiness in the face of adversity. While the work tackles disability, death, and grief, Mary’s and Laura’s environments are so idyllic and their optimism and perseverance so remarkable that the story retains an aura of uncomplicated gentleness throughout.
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hastings Creations Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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