A page-turning coming-of-age tale that offers an offbeat spin on the YA suspense genre.
In author Vincent’s debut, a Midwestern teenager learns that everything she’s been told about her childhood is a lie.
Bright, outgoing, and athletic Loretta “Retta” Brooks, a 15-year-old girl in small-town Buckley, Iowa, has been home-schooled her whole life and has spent a lot of time alone. Her mother has long told her that they were the sole survivors of a van accident that killed Retta’s father and all four of her grandparents. Now, as the teen enters public high school, she still feels the effects of her mom’s constant hovering, as the latter works in the school lunchroom. Her mother explains that she’s preoccupied with Retta’s safety and security because of the long-ago accident. But when Retta later tries to secure a copy of her birth certificate from their native Nebraska, only to come up empty-handed, she starts to doubt the murky car-crash account. She soon realizes that her mother has been feeding her a false narrative. A shocking criminal act makes Retta call a phone number that her mother made her memorize for emergencies, which sends her into a Midwest underground of protective strangers and safe houses. There are certainly elements of this story that call to mind the psychological thrillers of Mary Higgins Clark, but Vincent intriguingly chooses to focus on the young protagonist’s feelings of anger, grief, rebellion, and helpless bewilderment when she finds out that nothing she thought she knew is true—including her own name. (Readers may also recall Robert Cormier’s 1977 YA mainstay I Am the Cheese.) The story occasionally pairs Retta with Jack, a potential boyfriend from a Punjabi immigrant household whose members deal with their own issues of control and conservatism; this adds an intriguing multicultural note to the story and deepens its exploration of themes of identity. The author also appends an essay to her gripping story, addressing domestic violence and the personal and social pathologies it breeds.
A page-turning coming-of-age tale that offers an offbeat spin on the YA suspense genre.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5092-2903-1
Page Count: 324
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
