A heartening apprentice tale and a sound introduction to teenage issues and adult prejudices.
A girl trains to inherit her grandmother’s magic business in this debut YA novel from a children’s book author.
Robin West lives with her mother and Gram and attends River County Junior-Senior High in Franken, a small town where everybody knows everyone else. Robin plays field hockey and she’s good at art. But her best friend, Pita, is a Greek-American, and she and Robin don’t quite fit in with any of the groups at school: “Living in the spaces between the cliques is hard enough; if anyone found out about Madder business, I would just have to stop going to school completely.” Madder business is what Gram does, and Robin is only beginning to learn about it—the painting of hexes to help people in need of good fortune or protection. Gram wants Robin to be her apprentice. The girl is a natural and shows signs of becoming a powerful hexenmeister. But it’s tough to balance schoolwork and field hockey practice with Madder business (let alone a social life). And when a crazy preacher arrives in town, railing against hexes and denouncing the “witches” who make them, Robin has to contend not only with lost field hockey games, a martinet of an art teacher, and snooty class princess Melody Dwayne, but also a general upsurge of superstition and distrust. Can Robin carry on upholding the virtues her Gram has instilled, or will the town turn against her? Hodgkins (Do Seals Ever…?, 2017, etc.) writes in the first person and depicts a believable cast of characters, each recognizable but not clichéd. Robin herself is full of life. She has foibles, yet these haven’t been thrown in merely to create conflict and further the plot (which the author keeps realistic within the premise of Madder business). Robin is self-aware, empathic, conflicted, but rational, and her relationships with Pita and Gram are full of warmth. The dialogue flows, and Hodgkins delivers a tale that maintains its pace throughout. This leads to some key moments rushing past—the ending, for one—but the narrative pull is undeniable. YA readers should partake of Madder business as eagerly as if under a hex.
A heartening apprentice tale and a sound introduction to teenage issues and adult prejudices.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 233
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
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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