This series opener has it all: strong females, intrigue, a dash of romance, monsters, and a sequel in the wings.
Girl power reigns in this debut fantasy series.
Sixteen-year-old Maia believes in heroes and has always idolized the Effigies. No one is more surprised than she is when Natalya, the fire Effigy, dies and Maia is chosen to take her place. Known for their superhuman strength and the ability to control an element, the four, female Effigies are destined to fight phantoms, dark creatures that plague the world. When New York falls prey to a series of phantom attacks orchestrated by a man who can somehow control them, Maia finds herself in the middle of the action. Afraid and untrained, she must learn to work with the other Effigies—timid Lake, angry Chae Rin, and cold, powerful Belle—to save the world. What Maia lacks in skill, she makes up in spunk; however, she spends too long bumbling around, wondering what’s going on—but that’s intentional. In a world where Effigies are not just heroes, but also celebrities, the novel places an emphasis on humanizing the girls. As she gets to know her sisters-in-battle, it’s not long before Maia realizes that Effigies are only human. The characters’ races are somewhat ambiguous: Buffalo-born Maia’s mother is from Jamaica, British Lake is brown-skinned, French Belle is blonde and white, and Chae Rin is a Canadian originally from South Korea.
This series opener has it all: strong females, intrigue, a dash of romance, monsters, and a sequel in the wings. (Fantasy. 14 & up)Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6677-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come.
A heady blend of courtly double-crossing, Faerie lore, and toxic attraction swirls together in the sequel to The Cruel Prince (2018).
Five months after engineering a coup, human teen Jude is starting to feel the strain of secretly controlling King Cardan and running his Faerie kingdom. Jude’s self-loathing and anger at the traumatic events of her childhood (her Faerie “dad” killed her parents, and Faerie is not a particularly easy place even for the best-adjusted human) drive her ambition, which is tempered by her desire to make the world she loves and hates a little fairer. Much of the story revolves around plotting (the Queen of the Undersea wants the throne; Jude’s Faerie father wants power; Jude’s twin, Taryn, wants her Faerie betrothed by her side), but the underlying tension—sexual and political—between Jude and Cardan also takes some unexpected twists. Black’s writing is both contemporary and classic; her world is, at this point, intensely well-realized, so that some plot twists seem almost inevitable. Faerie is a strange place where immortal, multihued, multiformed denizens can’t lie but can twist everything; Jude—who can lie—is an outlier, and her first-person, present-tense narration reveals more than she would choose. With curly dark brown hair, Jude and Taryn are never identified by race in human terms.
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come. (map) (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31035-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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