A sturdy, well-crafted, and vibrant fantasy.
An adventure in a strange land could prove deadly for two sisters in this thriller.
The life of Ashlyn Revere has stalled. Two months after graduating from college, Ashlyn is still searching for her break in publishing while living at home with her parents and three siblings. One of those is her sarcastic, fragile teen sister, Penny, who has battled cystic fibrosis her entire life. Their world changes forever when Penny stows away in Ashlyn’s car during a trip to a job interview and they are involved in a multicar accident. The sisters are left comatose and hospitalized. Ashlyn awakens in a fantasy realm called Summervale, which is ruled by the Dark Lord. She is befriended by a large black rabbit and later a Scarlet Knight. After being trained by the knight, Ashlyn sets off to rescue Penny. But Penny, who is healthy in Summervale, is content to play house with Mr. Darcy rather than return to the real world. Penny eventually wakes up in the real world but Ashlyn’s condition worsens. After one of the Dark Lord’s underlings reveals to Ashlyn her tenuous state, she opts to raise an army and attack the Dark Lord’s headquarters to gain her freedom. Edmonds (Snowflake’s Chance, 2018, etc.) performs a nifty trick, embedding a family drama in a dream tableau, allowing both Ashlyn and Penny to become heroes in their own stories. The two sisters love and resent each other. Ashlyn always felt responsible for her sickly sister while Penny envied her healthy, athletic sibling. Will love win out? The author effectively alternates between the medical drama in the real world and the fantastical happenings in the sisters’ dreamscapes, heightening the tension. What Edmonds does especially well is to sprinkle fantasy and pop-culture references throughout, making the volume accessible even to readers who aren’t genre fans. What results is a charming tale that allows every reader to smile knowingly.
A sturdy, well-crafted, and vibrant fantasy.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73404-640-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Scary Hippopotamus Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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