An exemplary tale that boasts a plucky heroine, paranormal dangers, and adolescent hardships.
A teenager, still honing her recently discovered magical abilities, must help 11 witches in this third installment of a YA mystery series.
It hasn’t been long since Josie Jameson learned her dead mother was a powerful stone witch. Inside Josie’s heart is the Agatha Stone that her mom once carried and that contains pieces of 11 other stones. In various parts of the world reside 11 witches, like Josie, who carry stones that may have, over time, become corrupted. Josie has the unfortunate assignment of cleansing these stones, as she’s evidently the only one with the ability to do so. It turns out there’s a link between the witches, so she may be able to help the women without traversing the globe. But the downside is that some are dark witches who, via magic, threaten Josie or her friends and family, such as her little brother, Owen. As she can barely control her magic, Josie doesn’t think she can handle the stone cleansings alone. But her sometimes-frightening encounters with stone witches scare off a few of her pals. And as someone Josie knows winds up dead from an apparent murder, locating all 11 witches is a potentially fatal undertaking. Hotes’ (Stone Heart, 2015, etc.) latest installment is a laudable fusion of teenage melodrama and the supernatural. Josie hasn’t fully grasped her powers, which also include a healing capability. But she likewise faces more familiar teen tribulations. Her childhood friend Casey has seemingly abandoned her for the popular crowd. In addition to confronting menaces (evil witches and possibly more), the dauntless protagonist unravels a bit of mystery: something from her mother’s past. Crisp prose throughout Josie’s first-person narrative aids in creating believable characters: “I’m flooded with salted caramel feelings, not mad exactly and not entirely happy. Very sticky.” Despite a definitive conclusion, the book’s open ending teases further adventures with Josie.
An exemplary tale that boasts a plucky heroine, paranormal dangers, and adolescent hardships.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72870-601-6
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Storm Mystery Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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