Plenty of grown up “Pants” fans will swoon for this hokey but undeniably effective romance, and an ambiguous ending leaves...
Primarily known for her young adult Traveling Pants series, Brashares offers her second adult novel (The Last Summer (Of You and Me), 2007), about a man who remembers his past lives and the woman he’s loved through them all.
In 2004, Virginia high-school student Lucy develops an obsessive crush on a mysterious new classmate, Daniel. They finally share a kiss at the Senior Ball, but then Daniel calls her Sophia and insists that they have loved each other for centuries. A frightened Lucy runs away, leaving Daniel bereft. He has spent most of his many lives trying to find Sophia, ever since their disastrous first meeting during his first remembered life. As a soldier in North Africa in the sixth century he mistakenly burned down a house (think civilian casualties in Afghanistan), causing a little girl version of Sophia to die—his “original sin.” Two hundred years later in Asia Minor, Daniel helped the woman her soul then inhabited escape from her abusive husband, Daniel’s older brother Joaquim, who then killed him. Throughout the centuries when Daniel and Sophia have met, their ages or circumstances usually kept them apart. However, during World War I Sophia/Constance was his nurse and sweetheart at a British military hospital where she hid a letter of explanation about Daniel to her future self. Fast forward to 2006. Attending college, Lucy has lost track of Daniel. Then a psychic shocks her by bringing up Daniel by name. Now driven to find the truth through hypnosis and the Internet, Lucy finds the WWI letter and accepts her pasts. But she can’t find Daniel. Unfortunately, menacing Joaquim is on Daniel’s trail too.
Plenty of grown up “Pants” fans will swoon for this hokey but undeniably effective romance, and an ambiguous ending leaves the door ajar for a sequel.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-758-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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