A vivid and intricate fantasy tale about the ties that bind and the conflicts between two realms.
The faery sphere and the human world collide in this third installment of a series.
The story opens with the loss of Celeste, the human who was raised with the faery Princess Nahia as if they were sisters. Celeste had chosen to remain in the human realm so she had lived a short life span instead of the longer one she could have experienced in the faery kingdom. Even in the wake of this grief, Nahia still has a rocky relationship with some of Celeste’s clan. When Nahia is invited to bestow a gift on a new baby in the family, a strange impulse comes over her, and she steals the child and takes him to the faery world, determined to keep him there. When this doesn’t work out, Nahia bides her time and devises another scheme, vowing to be with the man she thinks is destined for her. Lurking beyond these romantic endeavors and family squabbles is another huge threat to the faery kingdom. Ultimately, Nahia will have to make decisions about whether to break promises in order to save the faeries. The story covers many years, but each chapter heading details the time period for the reader’s benefit. The jumps through time can still be a little abrupt—for instance, Chapter 14 covers two pages and spans 14 years, and a notable child quickly goes from a baby to a young talking girl. The characters’ families are quite large, and the reader may need to draw a tree to keep track of them all. Ultimately, such complexities should appeal to readers who enjoy expansive fantasy worlds. In addition, Bossano’s (Cradle Gift, 2013, etc.) writing is beautiful and rich with detail (“She dove into the gnarled gullies and misty woodland on her way to Moon Dancer Lake”). Much of the novel takes place in Spain, and the setting is infused with Basque culture. The immediate conflict in the saga changes a few times—in Chapter 16, the faeries suddenly find themselves fighting for their lives. But the overarching themes of loyalty, family, and weighing one’s own desires versus the greater good remain throughout.
A vivid and intricate fantasy tale about the ties that bind and the conflicts between two realms.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Waterbearer Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 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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