The start of what promises to be a tumultuous, visionary fantasy series.
Neill’s (City on a Hill, 2014) fantasy features a teenage girl on a quest to save her island tribe from the designs of a militant fleet.
Fourteen-year-old Gabriella Carlyle is from the island of Harkness. Her 11-year-old brother, Dameon, is fluent with numbers but a social outcast due to his inward nature. One day, he’s counting grains of sand while Gabriella and her friend, Eloise, are harvesting mussels by the shore. They witness the arrival of a formidable-looking vessel, and the cloaked men who disembark seem rough and ready for battle. The leader of the island, Chief Salinger, greets one of the men, Sade, who’s part of a group called the Servior. Sade explains that the visitors hope to purchase land next to the Tower of the Dead, which stands as a portal between life and the afterlife. When the villagers perform a ritual to consult with their ancestors, the dead speak through Gabriella and reveal that “the Servior...those whom they serve are treacherous.” A loner named Omanuju Ant decides to help Gabriella find the treasure of Nicomedes on the far-flung Eastern Continent, which may thwart Sade and his men; in return, perhaps the dead will heal Dameon. In this opening installment of a vigorously imagined series, Neill delivers an epic that’s as grand as it is brief. Episodic brilliance characterizes Gabriella and Omanuju’s adventures, such as when they befriend Ghede, who pilots the floating ship Elawn—and a dragon race ensues. Alternating chapters flash back to Sade and his younger brother, Vondales, growing up as orphans on the island of Illicaine and later becoming teenage savages on a sharp rise to power. Neill’s prose is often beautiful, as when Gabriella “could make out the shape of undulating hills and ridges silhouetted against the spray of stars.” Alongside frequent scenes of brutality, there are dear instances of wisdom, as when Omanuju says, “Sometimes when we find a person hard to love, the failure is in us, rather than them.” A finale featuring deft, magical weirdness only elevates the narrative further.
The start of what promises to be a tumultuous, visionary fantasy series.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Tenebray
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thrilling romance that could use more even pacing.
For the second time in her life, Leo must choose between her family and true love.
Nineteen-year-old Princess Leonie Kolburg’s royal family is bankrupt. In order to salvage the fortune they accrued before humans fled the frozen Earth 170 years ago, Leonie’s father is forcing her to participate in the Valg Season, an elaborate set of matchmaking events held to facilitate the marriages of rich and royal teens. Leo grudgingly joins in even though she has other ideas: She’s invented a water filtration system that, if patented, could provide a steady income—that is if Leo’s calculating Aunt Freja, the Captain of the ship hosting the festivities, stops blocking her at every turn. Just as Leo is about to give up hope, her long-lost love, Elliot, suddenly appears onboard three years after Leo’s family forced her to break off their engagement. Donne (Brightly Burning, 2018) returns to space, this time examining the fascinatingly twisted world of the rich and famous. Leo and her peers are nuanced, deeply felt, and diverse in terms of sexuality but not race, which may be a function of the realities of wealth and power. The plot is fast paced although somewhat uneven: Most of the action resolves in the last quarter of the book, which makes the resolutions to drawn-out conflicts feel rushed.
A thrilling romance that could use more even pacing. (Science fiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-94894-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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