A lively and fantastical adventure through Arthurian legend and Depression-era Texas.
In this YA fantasy debut, a teen learns that she is a changeling who must protect a magical, realm-spanning contraption from demonic forces.
Forced to spend a week with his grandmother in Austin, Texas, Perry breaks into her storage chest and uncovers an old book with a green cover. This volume tells of 13-year-old Lorenda “Maggie” Wells, who helps her mother run a hotel in Fort Richards, Texas, during the Depression. One day, a creepy woman arrives at the hotel, dressed in black and wearing sunglasses. She calls herself Vivienne but is also known as the Lady of the Lake (from Arthurian legend). She kidnaps Maggie and returns her to Avalon, revealing that the teen was switched at birth to live with human parents. Avalon is Vivienne’s realm, one of many “Otherworlds” connected by the Imaginaerium Engine—a fantabulous device hidden in the Fort Richards clocktower and threatened by primal forces of evil known as the Fomoire. At first, Maggie resolves to escape from Vivienne and her ethereal kin (the Tuatha Dé). But then the teen begins to manifest her own powers, including dream prophesy and an unpredictable affinity with water. When Vivienne is shot by a Fomoire agent, it falls to Maggie to return to Fort Richards with her teen Tuatha Dé relatives to safeguard the Imaginaerium Engine. Wayne, known for his short stories and plays, makes a smooth transition to the longer form, relating Maggie’s tale by way of an uncomplicated yet vivid, omniscient past-tense narrative. The dialogue rings true, reflecting both the era’s formal manners (Maggie addressing her mother as “Ma’am”) and, through the Tuatha Dé teens, a more relaxed, modern approach (“Wow, sorry about that. Didn’t mean to zap you”). In this series opener, Maggie is a relatable protagonist—proactive and determined yet conflicted in her reactions—and in depicting the normality of her human upbringing, the author captures a sense of place and time that contrasts effectively with her Tuatha Dé family’s otherworldliness. One qualm regarding the prose is that it doesn’t always successfully delineate moments of surprise or import (such as a railway bombing). Nonetheless, the narrative moves quickly and offers generous servings of novelty and excitement. Young readers will be carried along, eagerly anticipating further installments.
A lively and fantastical adventure through Arthurian legend and Depression-era Texas.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 9780984822942
Page Count: 454
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Returning fans, anyway, will pounce.
Houck kicks off a new story arc in the world of the Tiger’s Curse series with new tigers who live in a northerly setting.
The death of their widowed royal mother touches off a crisis in the Kievian Empire; neither Stacia nor Verusha Stepanov, 17-year-old sword-wielding twin sisters, wants to be named tsarina. But questions of succession get put on hold when a battle with a sorcerer inexplicably turns the two into nonspeaking Siberian tigers. Hints of a cure send them, along with a growing entourage of men to provide assistance (and, perforce, do all the talking), on a long trek. Though most of the cast sticks to genre type, Houck throws in a wild card in the form of hunky, inarticulate Nikolai, who joins the quest because he is enthralled by Verusha—and who also killed his whole family in an act of revenge. Occasional anachronistic dialogue (e.g., “Are you ready, ladies?”) disrupts the tale’s generally earnest tone, as do the clumsy attempts at banter. A third tiger, snarky and blind but conveniently able to see through others’ eyes, trots in late in the story. The events in this setup volume unfold with many a flashback and change in point of view and head toward no sort of resolution—only the cave-dwelling White Shaman of the Tundra’s advice that further journeys are in the offing. The central cast in this Russian-inspired fantasy world presents white; the Indigenous population includes nomadic reindeer herders.
Returning fans, anyway, will pounce. (Fantasy. 13-16)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798212221696
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A glossy repackaging of a jejune tale.
A reissue of the 2016 novel published as Consider.
Alexandra Lucas and her boyfriend, Dominick, are about to start their senior year of high school when 500 vertexes—each one a doorway-shaped “hole into the fabric of the universe”—appear across the world, accompanied by holographic messages communicating news of Earth’s impending doom. The only escape is a one-way trip through the portals to a parallel future Earth. As people leave through the vertexes and the extinction event draws nearer, the world becomes increasingly unfamiliar. A lot has changed in the past several years, including expectations of mental health depictions in young adult literature; Alex’s struggle with anxiety and reliance on Ativan, which she calls her “little white savior” while initially discounting therapy as an intervention, make for a trite after-school special–level treatment of a complex situation; a short stint of effective therapy does finally occur but is so limited in duration that it contributes to the oversimplification of the topic. Alex also has unresolved issues with her Gulf War veteran father (who possibly grapples with PTSD). The slow pace of the plot as it depicts a crumbling society, along with stilted writing and insubstantial secondary characterization, limits the appeal of such a small-scale, personal story. Characters are minimally described and largely racially ambiguous; Alex has golden skin and curly brown hair.
A glossy repackaging of a jejune tale. (Science fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-72826-839-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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