by Billy Phillips Jenny Nissensen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2018
Imaginative, whimsical, and a fine preamble to a potential sequel.
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Phillips and Nissensen’s (The Color of Fear, 2015) YA horror series continues as 14-year-old Caitlin Fletcher returns to a transdimensional fairy-tale realm to rescue her kidnapped sister.
It’s been nearly a year since Caitlin visited the “nonmaterial realm of sheer imagination.” There, she’d befriended famous literary figures, such as Cinderella, and thwarted the evil Enchanter’s curse, which was turning the realm’s inhabitants into zombies. Lately, her psychotherapist has her doubting that the adventure ever happened. But when thousands of peculiar black crows appear in Hyde Park, Caitlin is quick to blame the Enchanter. Soon, a gang of “crowmen” from the other side enters the corporeal world, but its initial target surprisingly isn’t Caitlin—it’s her brainy, 10-year-old sister Natalie, whom they kidnap. It seems that Natalie has a connection to the most powerful realm of all: the “future kingdom” of Eos. Thankfully, Caitlin has help in her rescue mission from her “gruncle” (great-uncle) Derek Blackshaw; Glinda, the Good Witch of the South; and a few other alumni of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. The new allies aim to prevent an in-person meeting between the Enchanter and Natalie, as the young girl won’t be able to resist the Enchanter’s magical Red Spectrum of light, which is full of negative emotions. As in the authors’ preceding novel, this entertaining story offers zombified, ghoulish versions of literary characters. There’s plenty of other macabre content, as well, including the aforementioned creepy crowmen and ghouls who crave flesh and blood. However, the narrative also has an endearing sense of humor, as when redheaded Caitlin claims that she’s Goldilocks in an attempt to bypass some security. The likable protagonist faces countless obstacles, including her unusual obsessive-compulsive disorder, which sometimes forces her to look at ceiling corners. Despite the darker elements, the authors splash their descriptions with plenty of bright color: a “burning lurid red” sun, the “maroon glow of dusk,” or a portal of a “rich yellow light” swirling “into a golden whirlpool.”
Imaginative, whimsical, and a fine preamble to a potential sequel.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Toon Studio Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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