A spunky and jubilant love letter to superhero fans.
This YA debut stars two orphans who live in a city that benefits from—yet is somewhat plagued by—superheroes.
Seventeen-year-old Meg Sawyer resides in Lunar City. The metropolis suffers hardly any crime thanks to the Genetically Enhanced SuperVariant Program, which uses a serum to give people superpowers. Four heroes exist at a time, each with one of four abilities—telekinesis, invisibility, speed, and strength—and they serve for two years before giving up the skills. While Lunar City is safe from normal crime, the Supers frequently battle exotic villains, like Doctor Defect, in broad daylight. Both of Meg’s parents died during chaotic super-fights that trashed the city. But Meg is unsinkable. She’s got her GED, works at The Pure Bean cafe, and is best friends with a fellow orphan, 18-year-old Oliver Lee. One night, after super-fighting damages the cafe, Meg hustles to deliver a financial claim to City Hall. She finds Super No. 3 in a dumpster, injured. He says that his time as a hero is almost over, and he’d like to give her money for a fresh start in a safer city. Meg is overjoyed and hopes that Oliver will join her. But before leaving, she stumbles on evidence that the changing of the superhero guard is a more sinister affair than the public realizes. In this novel, Simonds dances gracefully on the line between realism and the many colorful tropes of the superhero genre (including chemical spills and animal bites). Excellent pacing regularly introduces characters who keep the plot fresh and fun, like Juniper Jensen, a “biogenetic engineering assistant” who helped create the Super serum. When Meg sneaks into the Saint Charles’s Academy to discover the identity of one of the Supers, aficionados of the Spider-Man comics and films should be charmed by clever—and nerdy—plot developments. Later twists, some more predictable than others, generate higher stakes for the heroes and Lunar City organically. The author maintains a consistent YA tone, never indulging in over-the-top content that some writers in the genre lean on. The potential sequel has an incredible jumping-off point.
A spunky and jubilant love letter to superhero fans.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 309
Publisher: The Parliament House
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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