A deliberately paced school tale of friendship, elemental intrigue, and danger.
In this YA fantasy debut, superpowered twins attend a prestigious academy while investigating their father’s death.
Fourteen-year-old twins CJ and Nikki Andrews are Deviants, able to manifest fire and ice, respectively. Eight years ago, their father, Todd, died while on security duty at Navia’s Academy for Preternaturals in Winona, Illinois. Sam, the twins’ mother, is now ready to send them to the school so they can train to harness their powers. The handsome, athletic CJ basks in the attention of his new female classmates. The introverted Nikki researches the details surrounding their father’s death by gunshot wound, starting with the Ghost Scarlet, a Deviant who uses her ability to run a terrorist cult. Despite meeting colorful students and staff, like teacher Jacob Lucas and security guard William Milord, the siblings bridle at the academy’s structure. A mental block keeps CJ from manifesting fire at will, and he receives the embarrassing rank of 3.8, eliminating him from playing sports. An emergency lockdown, meanwhile, earns Nikki detention as she attempts to learn more about the Ghost Scarlet’s recent activities. New friendships form throughout the school year, but the twins also learn the truth behind Mr. Lucas’ words when he says, “The forces against us and our nation now are...beyond anything America has faced before.” In her novel, Carter splices some X-Men DNA with that of Harry Potter to give fantasy fans a school where anything can happen. Teachers at Navia have exotic animal familiars, like Ms. Holly’s clouded leopard, Cinya. The twins are enjoyably snarky with each other, as when discussing the X-shaped scar on Mr. Milord’s face (“it’s a safe bet that his hands didn’t slip while he was shaving”). Weekend visits with their mother are endearing, but catching her up on events at school sometimes hampers the narrative. Carter’s tiered power system—with the elements fire, ice, water, electricity, and acid coming first, followed by rare Special Abilities like telekinesis—is presented clearly for evenhanded exploration. The relationship that blossoms between CJ and Mr. Milord offers fans a further juicy mystery.
A deliberately paced school tale of friendship, elemental intrigue, and danger.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-84139-6
Page Count: 694
Publisher: Publisher Services
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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