A genuinely eerie tale, in a perfect setting and told with just the right amount of ambiguity.
Scottish novelist Thompson (Pandora’s Box, 1999, etc.) travels to a remote island where a lighthouse-keeper, a shipwreck survivor, and several ghosts try their best to get along.
In 1826, for a retired seaman, lighthouse-keeping looked like a pretty cushy job. You got free rent, the work was easy, and almost all of your salary was clear profit. Cameron Black, the keeper at Jacob’s Rock (a barren isle off the west coast of Scotland) was very happy there. The loneliness that everyone considered the hardest part of the life didn’t bother Cameron: he was happy to spend his free hours studying the Bible, and he had lately been sent an assistant (Simon) to share his duties. Younger than Cameron, Simon was less used to the solitary life, but he adjusted to the routine and became a reliable companion. But their quiet bachelor existence changed overnight when Cameron discovered a young woman washed ashore on the beach. Nude (save for a locket around her neck), unconscious, and barely alive, the woman is nursed back to life but cannot recall who she is or how she got there. Cameron names her Lucia (the name of the ship pictured inside her locket) and decides to keep her on the island until she has recovered her wits. That doesn’t promise to be any day soon: Lucia appears sane and manages to take charge of many of the household tasks, but she is prey to strange visions and hallucinations. She sees people (a ship captain, a mulatto girl) and things (an empty ship) that don’t exist, and she hears distant voices crying out at night. Are these just the product of her confusion, or could they be the ghosts of the slaves kept there when the island was a secret outpost of the slave trade? And why won’t Cameron let Lucia return to the mainland? In most ghost stories, you are sure at least of who is being haunted. Here it becomes murkier as you go along.
A genuinely eerie tale, in a perfect setting and told with just the right amount of ambiguity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31810-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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