Successfully explores the power of stories and storytelling across place and time.
In Sylvester’s debut novel, myth and mystery collide on an isolated Scottish island when two strangers move in.
Flora can’t wait to escape from Bancree, a remote island barely sustaining its whisky trade. As she begins her final year of school, a father and daughter move into an abandoned cottage across the bay. Flora is drawn to dark-eyed John Dobie and his daughter, Ailsa, and the two girls soon become friends. Flora’s history teacher assigns a project about Scottish mythology that finds Flora collecting stories of selkies, human-seal hybrids who break the hearts of those who fall in love with them. Izzy, the local shennachie, a “storyteller of the oldest sort,” serves as one of her sources, and through her research and Izzy’s tales, Flora becomes obsessed with selkies and begins to wonder whether there might be truth to the old legends after all. Several local men go missing, including one of Flora's family friends. Have they wandered off while drinking, or could there be a supernatural explanation? Though billed as a mystery, the novel is much less a whodunit than a meditation on place, history, and progress. Sylvester’s descriptions of the dying town of Bancree and its wild shores add more than atmosphere. Like many modern teenagers, Flora feels like an outsider and can’t wait to leave for college, but the remote geography of the islands imbues the novel with an old-fashioned feel as well. While Flora’s voice doesn’t always sound authentically “teen-age girl,” her world-weariness seems to come from her acute awareness of not belonging. In the end, Sylvester’s biggest success is ambiguity. The mystery plot is clearly wrapped up, but the mythic echoes are allowed to resonate, making the reader question the line between story and truth.
Successfully explores the power of stories and storytelling across place and time.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-463-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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