An absorbing, emotional tale with a strong hook for animal lovers.
In Feuerstein’s debut paranormal thriller, a young woman learns about her heritage, including special powers, as she’s tracked by government forces.
Morey Chance, 25, a wildlife photographer, is haunted. In a dream that’s recurred since her girlhood, she sees a shadowy woman tell her father that Morey “has the magic.” During a trip to British Columbia, a grizzly bear looks Morey straight in the eye and leads her to a hidden valley where bears are safe from humans. Then Morey’s archaeologist father, Francis, dies, and Morey returns home to her Aunt Katherine’s house on Maine’s Apoquaque Island. There, she learns startling truths about her mother and receives her “birthright”: a mysterious cylinder inscribed with strange symbols. A similar cylinder, discovered by her father, destroyed his career when it was deemed to be a faked ancient artifact. However, National Security Agency operatives are now eager to claim Morey’s cylinder, and they’re headed for Apoquaque. Meanwhile, Morey meets some island residents and an intriguing, attractive scientist named Hill, who’s studying the island’s ecosystem and expresses concern about an offshore oil rig. Morey finds that Hill’s presence feels “warm and good and wonderfully familiar,” and Hill is equally drawn to Morey. Not only that, she helps Morey discover more about her birthright and her mission. Soon, Morey undertakes a dangerous rite of passage as NSA agents close in. Feuerstein’s novel taps into a potent, poignant modern fantasy—a safe haven for the world’s endangered animals—and she does it without sentimentally tugging on readers’ heartstrings. Although the theme of discovering inherent, supernatural abilities is hardly new, Morey is an adult instead of an adolescent, which allows for more grown-up storytelling. Feuerstein captures her scenes and characters well, possessing a good eye for details: a dilapidated cabin, for example, is described as looking as if it “would be happier if allowed to lie down.” In fact, so much is done well in this novel that it’s surprising and unfortunate to see the hoary cliché of a villainous albino appear. However, the satisfying ending leaves room for potential sequels, which would be most welcome.
An absorbing, emotional tale with a strong hook for animal lovers.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4921-8202-3
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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