A satisfying tale that aptly balances teen drama with a bit of magic.
In this YA fantasy, a teenager suspects that the woman next door and her family are witches.
Fifteen-year-old Matt Mitchell and his twin sister, Tina, are still grieving from the loss of their mother. But their depressed father, Sam, wants no reminders of his wife, so he moves the family from Oregon to Hawthorne, Indiana. Matt is a target for high school bullies Clayton Cartwright, Colin O’Connell, and Dylan Jones and hears rumors that his next-door neighbor, Old Lady Hawthorne, is a witch who, years ago, murdered her husband and his lover. But with the Mitchells’ finances tight, Matt offers to tend to his neighbor’s yard. The lady, Vivianne, proves accommodating and quite friendly, notwithstanding some eccentricities. Her niece, Gwendolyn, and her three kids soon leave Maine and move into Vivianne’s home, and Matt quickly befriends the boy his age, Gerallt. But it turns out there may be validity to the witch rumor. The Hawthornes are druids, capable of magic, and Gerallt believes the amulet he wears is a gift from the Celtic goddess Modron. Casting spells against bullies certainly has benefits, but the Hawthornes won’t like Gerallt revealing family secrets to Matt, whom they consider an “outsider.” Firesmith’s (Hell Holes, 2016, etc.) novel, an absorbing tale of two diverse friends, smartly downplays the fantastical elements. Gerallt, for example, views the magic as simply part of his religion and rightly takes offense when Matt suggests the amulet is “some kind of advanced alien tech.” While the book initially centers on Matt and Gerallt versus the bullies, it oddly splits into subplots resembling short stories (complete with their own resolutions): a stolen amulet, the reputed Hawthorne treasure, and a Tina-centric story. The author’s prose is lucid and descriptive, though its most notable quality is the Hawthornes’ pronounced New England lilt (“Gerallt knows bettah than tah call attention tah himself”). The story ends with several addenda, including lists of characters and Maine idioms, and the promise of further adventures with Matt and Gerallt
A satisfying tale that aptly balances teen drama with a bit of magic.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72628-315-1
Page Count: 413
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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