An engrossing, magical, often violent, and tender tale, with one very captivating wolf.
A debut novel offers an adventure that mystically and biologically connects two families separated in time by more than 30,000 years.
On a treacherously stormy night, Dr. Will Celestian is high in the Peruvian Andes, accompanied by his 12-year-old son, Skyler, and his guide, Gabriel. Will is about to make the discovery of a lifetime—a deep cave that was home to the first Stone Age humans to cross from the Siberian Steppe onto the American continents. Skyler is the one who spots the passage to the cave. He rappels down a tunnel leading to a vast space and is the first to look upon the cave walls. There, he and Will see a series of enormous murals that depict the more than 10,000-mile journey made on foot by one family in search of a new “hearth” to call its own. Jump back 30,000 to 35,000 years, and readers meet Ruachk, a great hunter somewhere on the Siberian Steppe. He is with his 5-year-old son, Sky, teaching him to hunt. They have trapped a wolf, but Sky refuses to kill it. He is “struck by the magnificence of the young wolf…the mournful look in its clear, yellow eyes.” He wants to set the wolf free and sketch it. Golden’s imaginative, vividly drawn narrative toggles between the past and present. Ruachk and his family fend off violent attacks from a variety of prehistoric predators and an especially venomous giant known as White Eye, who is part Neanderthal and part beast. Will battles modern enemies—a wife who leaves him and wants custody of the children, a university that stakes a claim to his discovery, and his own psychological demons. The central characters, especially Ruachk and Sky, are finely drawn, practically leaping off the page. And the author is meticulous in describing toolmaking, details of the extremely bloody hunts, and the ancient frozen, forbidding topography. But it is confusing that he consistently describes the trek from Siberia, across the long-since disappeared Beringia land bridge, into North America, as heading west rather than east.
An engrossing, magical, often violent, and tender tale, with one very captivating wolf.Pub Date: July 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72836-684-5
Page Count: 462
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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