A strong continuation of a teen fantasy series that doesn’t shy away from life’s darker side.
In the second book of her YA paranormal fantasy series, Terrien (The Rampart Guards, 2016) pits her 14-year-old hero against the insidious forces of authoritarianism.
Over the last year, Jason Lex has already come to terms with a lot: the existence of cryptids on Earth (not-so-mythical creatures, such as Encantados and Yeti); his own newly discovered fire-wielding powers as a Rampart Guard; and his mother’s death after she turned evil and tried to destroy the world. It’s a lot to cope with, and just when Jason’s life seems as if it might be settling down, a new threat emerges from within the League of Governors, which regulates interactions between humans and cryptids. After following his father and sister from the United States to London, Jason is attacked by a man in a ski mask. When he wakes up, he’s in a strange hospital, run by members of a conspiracy that threatens not only to topple the League, but also to take away everyone Jason holds dear. Adult readers may initially find Terrien’s delivery lacking in weight, as her prose contains little description and little sense of place, and events unfold more with subsequence than consequence. The lack of emotional impact, however, is quite in keeping with its young-adult characters’ worldview. Jason sometimes appears to be naïve, but he is, in fact, merely trusting and unprejudiced. When he seems indifferent, he’s really just showing a 14-year-old’s distinct form of resilience. Jason is the only character who has a fully developed voice; he’s a disinterested, angst-y, yet clearsighted and determined teenager. The other characters blend into a homogeneous cast of not-Jasons—but that’s the point. As the story’s paranormal element remains largely in the background, Jason fights against the League’s oppressive demand for conformity. He carries the dual burdens of feeling powerless and responsible, and his struggle is the perfect metaphor for teenage isolation. The book is relatable on this fundamental level, and its creepy setting and end-of-chapter hooks will entice many YA readers.
A strong continuation of a teen fantasy series that doesn’t shy away from life’s darker side.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9969031-4-1
Page Count: 431
Publisher: Camashea Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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