An engaging fantasy whose romantic arc will likely divide readers.
This YA debut sees a teenager discover that a mythic destiny awaits in her parents’ homeland.
Eighteen-year-old Dorothy Dizon, a Filipino-American, lives in Las Vegas. She’s her class valedictorian at Valley High, a star basketball player, and indispensable to her mother, Meredith, who has liver cancer. Though her father seemingly abandoned the family years ago, Dorothy has embraced life to the utmost. Tonight she and her statuesque best friend, fellow Filipina Stella De Guzman, dance at the Tao Nightclub. When a middle-aged man gropes her, Dorothy uses taekwondo to pin him to the wall. She takes note not only of the strange craving in her throat, but also of the man’s exposed neck. The next day at school, Dorothy is dazzled by Adrian Rosario, a new Filipino exchange student. She has no idea that he’s a Danag—a vampire of Filipino lore who protects humans—from the Mandalagan area of Negros Island. As they grow acquainted, Dorothy is impressed by Adrian’s expertise in Filipino history, including his knowledge of the evil vampire Sitan and his duwende (goblin) minions. More shocking to Dorothy is that she has been giving off powerful signals, telling good and evil forces alike that she’s potentially descended from Urduja, the female warrior who saved Danag culture from the Mongols. For his fantasy series opener, Ursal provides a banquet of cultural textures about the Philippines without sacrificing a brisk pace and smooth prose. Adrian seems like the quintessential bad boy, sporting tattoos and driving a Mustang, yet he’s a Muslim who prays five times a day and understands that “we surrender time to Allah in exchange for safety and peace.” The fantasy elements (like Adrian’s glow) remain low key throughout much of the narrative, playfully recalling other series like Twilight. The author also mentions the tragedy of a vanishing culture, for while Adrian discusses Filipino lore, Dorothy thinks: “It would be a miracle if these stories would be remembered a hundred years from now.” Action heats up the finale, as does a love triangle that crudely elbows one protagonist out of the spotlight.
An engaging fantasy whose romantic arc will likely divide readers.Pub Date: March 14, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Pacific Boulevard Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2019
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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