A creative, if unevenly written, piece of new-adult escapism for devotees of the dark realms.
An 18-year-old battles paranormal fiends in Atwood’s all-action YA debut.
Kacey Alexander lives in Woodland Falls, a once-happy city, now taken over by Olympus Security and run as a criminal enterprise. On her 18th birthday, she inherits a mysterious chest from her mother. It’s been four years since Kacey’s mom died, and although she’s tried to follow in her parent’s adventurous footsteps, she certainly isn’t expecting what’s inside the chest: knives and an illustrated journal. Meanwhile, Kacey’s best friend, Aidan, owns up to his ability to wield magic powers (as well as his longtime crush on Kacey); and as a further birthday surprise, the journal reveals that Kacey was born with the powers of a Mage, which were suppressed while she was a child but now are about to come into full effect. Kacey is shocked by these discoveries, but she puts them aside long enough to go and celebrate her birthday—only to come face to fang with her first vampire and thrown headlong into the brutal, if sometimes-beautiful, world of magic-wielding Sentinels. Conflicts between characters flare up without warning and settle down just as abruptly; Kacey’s first-person narration evinces these mood shifts, but her use of generic similes (“glowing like the embers of a dying fire”; “his green eyes shone like emeralds”) will dishearten readers who thrive on more vigorous prose. Still, there’s much else to like in Atwood’s imaginings. The paranormal elements have been thought out in depth, and they could easily form the basis for a TV series in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s a likable supporting cast, each with a back story and narrative potential, while Kacey herself is a sassy but socially responsible high school graduate who banters as well as she fights. The book may particularly appeal to fans of graphic novels looking for something more substantive. Overall, Atwood shows an unwavering devotion to kick-ass action and taking a stand against corporate (and inhuman) bad guys.
A creative, if unevenly written, piece of new-adult escapism for devotees of the dark realms.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61296-725-7
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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