A brave and canny heroine stands out in this portal adventure.
In this third installment of a series, a young girl leads a family in a dying world to safety in her own realm through a magic portal.
The two previous picture books, written in a fairy-tale–like style, introduced Magic Moon and his ability to grant certain requests. Now, this chapter book for young readers expands the concept, providing more background and linking Magic Moon’s world with Earth. The picture-book family now has names: Bronwen is the mother of Jackson, 10, and Dany, 7. But the realm they are inhabiting is temporary, and it’s time to return to their home world before the Gray Fog comes and obliterates all. Magic Moon is moving on as well but has promised Bronwen that a young girl will help. On present-day Earth, 10-year-old Tara has a warm family, including her father, mother, and stepfather, but she’s lonely for friends her own age. While exploring a mountain path, Tara discovers a secret cave. Following voices calling for aid, she steps through a magic portal and meets Jackson and Dany, leading them to safety. Tara’s father, Seneca, is enlisted to help Bronwen, who is injured. The two families get along well; Seneca invites Bronwen to use his cabin (he also has an apartment in the city), and by the end, Tara has gained new friends in Jackson and Dany—and maybe, she thinks, a stepmother in Bronwen. Moulton (Magic Moon: Sister’s Turn, 2017, etc.) offers much more detail and realism in this third series outing, although the reasons behind Bronwen’s first seeking a haven in another world remain murky. Sometimes the details aren’t well-chosen; knowing exactly where everyone was sitting in a truck doesn’t add much to the story, for example, except to pad out a rather thin plot. Moulton overly relies on distracting dialogue tags to convey meaning: “ ‘Hey, stop it!’ she warned,” for example, as if “stop it!” isn’t obviously a warning. That said, Tara’s resourcefulness is admirable. For example, needing a way to ensure she can find her way back to the cave, she tears her sock into strips and marks the path.
A brave and canny heroine stands out in this portal adventure.Pub Date: March 17, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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