An open, imaginative work of YA science fiction.
Human teens attempt to preserve their home on an alien world in Wright’s YA debut.
On the distant moon Sahara, where night lasts 27 hours and is lit by the blue-green glow of a nearby gas giant, human colonists do battle with the chimeras native to this strange world. Rumor has been training to fight them since his mother was killed years ago, but during an overwhelming attack on his settlement, he isn’t able to save his father. Nyx is deaf, though the moon beneath her feet speaks to her in strange ways, encouraging her to abandon her settlement and live among the rebels of the forest. Jude is one of these rebels, seeking peace between the humans and chimeras, which are beings with “great wings and long fingers and mountainous crags of teeth connected to jaws that could crush stars and inhale comets.” Braeden is the son of his settlement’s leader and suspects that the cause of the attacks might have something do with the chimera that his parents imprisoned in their basement. As the enemy prepares for another attack, these four teens will have to find a way to put a stop to the conflict, which will likely end in the annihilation of humans from Sahara’s surface. They only have 27 hours to complete this task, and given the way things have been going, it will be a miracle if any of them survive the long night. Wright writes in a snappy prose that serves the book’s tense action sequences: “The gargoyle launched, clawing the air where he’d just stood. It landed on the other side of him, sliding in the loose gravel as Rumor rolled and came up to a crouch, his blades ready.” The pacing is swift, and the storyline leaps among the perspectives of the four main characters in a way that gradually builds the reader’s understanding of the situation. In addition to its captivating humans-versus-monsters premise, the book features an admirably broad treatment of gender and sexuality—LGBT and asexual characters serve as the norm rather than the exception—in this futuristic world. Readers will come away hoping that further installments are in the works.
An open, imaginative work of YA science fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63375-820-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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