Kagawa’s fans will enjoy this expansion of her world.
Iron Queen Meghan Chase’s baby brother Ethan has grown into a broody bad boy.
Ethan Chase wants nothing more than to keep his head down and avoid notice. He hates the fey, as they torment him and interfere with his life on a regular basis because he can see them. He ably fills the teen-literature trope of the bad boy with a heart of gold who pushes people away for their own protection by behaving like a jerk. But fresh from a fey-caused school expulsion, Ethan finds two new classmates who refuse to leave him alone—half-fey Todd, desperate for Ethan’s help with a magical threat, and the rich, popular, attractive and above all, persistent school reporter, Kenzie. When Todd goes missing, Ethan surprises himself by plunging into Faery to try to save him from shadowy glamour-eating fey, a threat that may ring familiar to those who have read The Iron Knight (2011). Kenzie is caught in the crossfire. While unraveling the truth about this shadowy threat to Todd and other missing half-breeds and exiles, Ethan encounters various beloved Iron Fey characters in guest appearances and is joined by a simultaneously mysterious and familiar fey named Keirran. The danger accompanies multiple romantic plots.
Kagawa’s fans will enjoy this expansion of her world. (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-373-21057-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Flat secondary characterizations and humdrum dialogue won’t keep teens from relishing this histrionic tale of love, death...
Wealthy high school junior Mcalister “Caggie” Caulfield seeks relief from grief over her younger sister’s death by entering into a dangerous relationship with a mysterious boy.
After her little sister drowns in the pool at her family’s beach house in the Hamptons, Caggie wants to die too, to the point that she contemplates jumping off the roof at a friend’s party in Manhattan. A schoolmate named Kristen saves her at the last minute but nearly falls herself. Caggie actually ends up pulling Kristen back and is credited as a hero, which only makes her feel worse. In her grief, Caggie spurns the attentions of her best friend and devoted boyfriend, but she finds a kindred spirit in Astor, a tall, dark and damaged new boy at school who recently lost his mother to cancer. But what Caggie comes to realize about her relationship with Astor is that “[d]arkness stacked on darkness just makes it that much harder to find the light.” After another nearly fatal disaster with Astor at the beach house, Caggie is forced to confront the falsehoods she has told her family and friends and let go of her guilt over her sister’s death. Though Caggie makes a point of telling readers that her paternal grandfather called people like her “phony,” almost nothing is made of the connection to Catcher in the Rye, and it serves merely to make Caggie’s tale suffer by comparison.
Flat secondary characterizations and humdrum dialogue won’t keep teens from relishing this histrionic tale of love, death and lies. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-3316-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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