An entertaining and undemanding entry in a popular series.
This fantasy/romance story set in the world of the animated Disney film Brave reconciles Merida to her mother and her (slightly changed) future.
Nineteen-year-old Merida believes that she’s “her father’s fierce lass, not her mother’s proper princess.” She wants to be free—to change traditions and escape her fate as a bride in a marriage of political expedience. After a heated clash with her mother, Queen Elinor, Merida comes across a witch, who gives her a magical cake that guarantees “a great transformation.” After eating it, Merida wakes up in the past, where she discovers that when she was Merida’s age, Elinor had similar fears and aspirations. The chapters switch between following the young Elinor and the time-traveling Merida. The narrative feels somewhat bloated, but the pace is generally swift enough, propelled by Merida’s need to help her young mother escape her betrothal and maneuver her future parents into love so that she can return to the present. A subplot follows another consequence of Merida’s consumption of the witch’s spell, one involving a Viking threat. Meanwhile, the spell is inexorably physically transforming Merida, while moments of reflection show that she’s changing emotionally. The medieval Scottish setting is not richly developed, but some vocabulary adds to the atmosphere. Readers see Elinor develop royal responsibility but never learn why her own past hasn’t helped her understand her daughter. The story refers glancingly to the film, but the novel can stand alone.
An entertaining and undemanding entry in a popular series. (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781368077958
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Flat secondary characterizations and humdrum dialogue won’t keep teens from relishing this histrionic tale of love, death...
Wealthy high school junior Mcalister “Caggie” Caulfield seeks relief from grief over her younger sister’s death by entering into a dangerous relationship with a mysterious boy.
After her little sister drowns in the pool at her family’s beach house in the Hamptons, Caggie wants to die too, to the point that she contemplates jumping off the roof at a friend’s party in Manhattan. A schoolmate named Kristen saves her at the last minute but nearly falls herself. Caggie actually ends up pulling Kristen back and is credited as a hero, which only makes her feel worse. In her grief, Caggie spurns the attentions of her best friend and devoted boyfriend, but she finds a kindred spirit in Astor, a tall, dark and damaged new boy at school who recently lost his mother to cancer. But what Caggie comes to realize about her relationship with Astor is that “[d]arkness stacked on darkness just makes it that much harder to find the light.” After another nearly fatal disaster with Astor at the beach house, Caggie is forced to confront the falsehoods she has told her family and friends and let go of her guilt over her sister’s death. Though Caggie makes a point of telling readers that her paternal grandfather called people like her “phony,” almost nothing is made of the connection to Catcher in the Rye, and it serves merely to make Caggie’s tale suffer by comparison.
Flat secondary characterizations and humdrum dialogue won’t keep teens from relishing this histrionic tale of love, death and lies. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-3316-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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