An inventive adventure tale marred by familiar plotlines.
A quartet of friends searches for treasure on a mysterious island in this novel.
Jack Simmons is a 29-year-old living an unfulfilling life in Manhattan, a low-level computer clerk who aspires to become a software developer. In the hopes of lifting his sagging spirits, he decides to visit his mother, who is still reeling from the sudden death of his father. She reveals that his father left him a letter and a key to a locked chest that turns out to be filled with antique artifacts and a map of a Caribbean island somewhere near Barbados. Jack’s father, an archaeologist, had become obsessed with finding the island, which allegedly harbors a centuries-old treasure but is contaminated by a curse. According to Jack’s mother, that fanatical commitment to locating the island, named Carta, consumed his life. Later, she suffers a heart attack, and her doctor says she will need to be cared for in an expensive nursing facility. Jack decides he can raise the money for her health care by finding the booty that eluded his father. He sets off for Barbados with his best friends—Arthur McIntosh, Michael Hagen, and Lucie Lapierre—and is able to ascertain that the strange island once belonged to Alexander De Carta, a doctor conducting experiments there, who inexplicably vanished. The island was then shuttered in response to puzzling “mishaps” that plagued it. Jack and his friends locate Carta and travel there to discover its riches. But they are furtively shadowed by Josh Connelly and James Perkins, two of Jack’s work colleagues intent on stealing his reward and humiliating him. Leger (Reflections of the Heart, 2010, etc.) conjures a complex tale that combines a rich, imaginative history of early 19th-century piracy with a rousing contemporary adventure on a dangerous Caribbean island. Nearly every element of drama is included: mystery, intrigue, the supernatural, violence, and even a love blossoming between Jack and the plucky Lucie. But the plot as a whole is a tapestry of timeworn formulas, and even for a fabulist story challenges credulity. In addition, the writing, especially the dialogue, is mechanical and spiritless. Early on, Jack tells his mother: “The atrocious news of your heart attack bewildered me, and I came as soon as possible.”
An inventive adventure tale marred by familiar plotlines.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-2567-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
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