An enjoyable supernatural mystery that tries to do too many things at once.
A high schooler learns more about her powers and her enemies in this YA paranormal-adventure sequel by Tansley (The Girl Who Ignored Ghosts, 2015).
Kat Preston is beginning her senior year at McTernan Academy and trying to come to terms with everything that happened in previous novel. After learning that she’s the heir of the Langley family, one of four magically-inclined clans tied together by history and blood oaths, she’s inundated with requests from ghosts trying to receive their reckoning. But these spirits aren’t the only ones who have set their sights on Kat; a being known as the Dark One, intent on shifting the balance between darkness and light, is determined to destroy her. In order to survive, she must train at Dumbarton, the Langleys’ ancestral home. There, she’s accompanied by Evan, a teacher’s assistant who’s both the Kingsley heir and Kat’s potential love interest. After a near-death experience, Kat learns that in order to truly protect themselves, she and Evan must travel back in time, possess the bodies of Ellie Harding and Percy Kingsley, and reclaim the Kingsley dagger, an heirloom with magical properties. But when Kat decides to stay in the past to prevent a death, she risks more than she expected and exposes a dark force that’s been preying on the magical families. Tansley’s second series installment maintains the intrigue and complexity of the first as it further develops the ancient ties among the four families. This additional context allows for the inclusion of new magical abilities and powerful items, which will increase readers’ interest in the world that Tansley has created. However, this worldbuilding comes at a cost: the central conceit of the book—traveling back in time to inhabit the bodies of ancestors—provides engaging new characters but also causes the story to lose focus. The evil forces that Kat fears in the present, for example, recede for dozens of pages, which makes readers lose sight of the main plot arc.
An enjoyable supernatural mystery that tries to do too many things at once.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Beckett Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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