A fresh installment with a realistic protagonist whom teens will want to follow into the realms of the paranormal.
In Barnhart's (The Rampart Guards, 2016) YA fantasy sequel, a teenager comes face to face with shape-shifters and unwanted responsibilities.
Sadie Callahan is a 14-year-old orphan living with her grandmother, Mamo. The girl’s best friend, Jason Lex, is a Rampart Guard, responsible for maintaining the balance between humans and cryptids—supernatural beings such as Bigfoot, Yowies (“Like Bigfoot, but from Australia”),and the Loch Ness Monster. When Jason is called away, Sadie is able to spend some time being a normal 14-year-old girl—doing her homework, dealing with jerks at school, and meeting a boy. But just as Sadie’s life starts becoming comfortable and happy, it takes a turn for the worse. People start spontaneously and mysteriously falling asleep at school; then Mamo gets sick, and Sadie can’t get through to Jason. Then, one day, she comes home and finds Mamo unconscious on the floor, with a strange man kneeling at her side, appearing to throttle her. Sadie fights him off, but her questions are just beginning. It turns out that Mamo has been keeping secrets, and the past catches up with Sadie when a group called the Clan comes calling. In Sadie, Barnhart presents readers with a strong, relatable female protagonist. She could have remained merely an important secondary character in the series—a curious Hermione Granger to Jason Lex’s adventurous Harry Potter; instead, she’s entrusted with the lead role here, and Barnhart makes sure that she plays it very well. The author also paints the Callahans’ home life with the kind of vivid familiarity that makes them seem like real people, each with their own distinct likes and dislikes, personalities, drives, and mannerisms. Sadie herself is resilient yet vulnerable—a teen whose adolescent concerns and travails do much to complement the supernatural storyline, and her relationship with Mamo, in particular, is one of the book’s highlights. Barnhart's prose style is undemanding but inclusive; the audience will quickly find themselves caught by the plot’s current, but it’s the unaffectedness of Barnhart's writing that will first entice them into the water.
A fresh installment with a realistic protagonist whom teens will want to follow into the realms of the paranormal.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Camashea Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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