Lively supernatural investigations with humor and heart.
Following the (impermanent) death of her eccentric employer, R.F. Jackaby, Abigail Rook, much to her dismay, inherited his ability to see energy and emotional auras.
In this stand-alone set in the Jackaby series world, Abigail must now take the lead in their supernatural detective work. Most unusually, the New England city of New Fiddleham includes a rift to the supernatural world. Many paranormals—goblins, trolls, elves, fairies, and their like—have moved in, necessitating a Paranormal Division of police, for which Jackaby and Abigail consult. But while Abigail was cloistered for months, training as the new Seer, supernatural crime and human-paranormal tensions soared. Though feeling decidedly unready, Abigail must use her gift to trace a series of kidnappings and murders. Things grow especially bleak when her prospective sister-in-law, who can shape shift into dog form, is implicated in a murder and Abigail’s fiance, Charlie Barker, is kidnapped. Like Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. series, this book expertly blends witty banter, sympathetic, struggling characters, descriptive worldbuilding, and sometimes-gory supernatural crimes with all-too-believable motives. Quick-moving action and creative supernatural elements will hold readers’ attention, though characters’ memory-loss incidents might lead to some plot confusion, and the denouement feels rushed. Human-presenting characters read White; Charlie has a “faint Slavic accent.”
Lively supernatural investigations with humor and heart. (Fantasy. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781643752402
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A frothy mystery that trips over its desire for social relevance.
A mysterious social network sows discontent.
NEED is the hot new thing. The social network claims to provide the one thing each member truly needs. All a user has to do is provide the site with a request and perform a task. These tasks start off small, like emailing invitations to join the site to five people, but the bigger the need, the bigger the task. Sixteen-year-old Kaylee has one big need: a new kidney for her ailing younger brother. NEED has promised her the kidney, but how far will Kaylee go to get it? And how far will her classmates go to get what they desire above all else? Charbonneau provides readers with Kaylee's first-person perspective and sprinkles in several chapters from those of her peers. The result is a web as intricate as NEED's own networking. Less interesting is Kaylee's single-mindedness. The chapters that don't feature Kaylee are a welcome respite from her obsession with her younger brother's health. This trait is honorable at first, but it won’t take long for readers to decide that Kaylee has nothing else going on. When her friend Nate professes undying love, readers will wonder why. Other characters, such as Gina, the school's mean girl, and Ethan, a budding sociopath, are a delight. The book also squanders nuance regarding NEED's social and psychological implications. These themes are spoken aloud by NEED's creator, a comically villainous character who would be charming if one didn’t suspect her primary purpose is making subtext into text.
A frothy mystery that trips over its desire for social relevance. (Thriller. 12-16)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-41669-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed.
The third episode in the Skyward series sees red-hot space pilot Spensa Nightshade coming into her full powers as she battles both pirates and space monsters in a strange interdimensional nowhere.
Leaving her ongoing feud with evil galactic overlords on temporary hold back in the somewhere, Spensa passes through a portal to a realm where time and memories tend to slip away, bits of landscape randomly snipped from reality float like islands around a distant sunburst—and teeming hordes of disembodied, malevolent entities called delvers are relentlessly hunting her down. Fun as all the space-opera elements are, though, they continue a trend from the preceding volume in deadening the efforts of Spensa and sidekicks old and new to establish personal identities or backstories, wrestle with inner demons, or, in the case of the AI M-Bot, practice insults and deal with newly discovered emotions. A few wild aerial dogfights and larger battles later, however, Spensa has come into her cytonic superpowers, found out some crucial things about the delvers, and made her way back to the somewhere. Now for those overlords….McSweeney contributes a map, lovingly detailed sets of spaceship plans, and galleries of the multispecies cast members. Wild diversity of intergalactic body types notwithstanding, human members seem uniformly White.
More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed. (Science fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-399-55585-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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