The Call - Peadar O'Guilin

Thousands of years ago, humans banished the Sidhe fairy race to another dimension. The beautiful, terrible Sidhe have stewed in a land of horrors ever since, plotting their revenge... and now their day has come.

Fourteen-year-old Nessa lives in a world where every teen will be "Called." It could come in the middle of the day, it could come deep in the night. But one instant she will be here, and the next she will wake up naked and alone in the Sidhe land. She will be spotted, hunted down, and brutally murdered. And she will be sent back in pieces by the Sidhe to the human world... unless she joins the rare few who survive for twenty-four hours and escape unscathed.

Nessa trains with her friends at an academy designed to maximize her chances at survival. But as the days tick by and her classmates go one by one, the threat of her Call lurks ever closer... and with it the threat of an even more insidious danger closer to home.

SO CREEPY!

Like, seriously, the ways in which humans are tortured, manipulated, and torn apart by the Sidhe is just just twisted! Actually, the whole back story is fascinating and eerie, and I was hooked from the first chapter.

Nessa has polio, so she can't walk or run fight in the same ways that others can. But she's become quite resourceful. She can make crutches out of tree branches, she can use smooth rocks and mud to help herself slide to safety. But no matter how she may or may not survive the Sidhe matters only if she can survive her enemies at school. Conor is a bully and has a lot of darkness lingering inside, and he has a group of students willing to do whatever he wants.

There are secrets and lies, fears and insecurities. This book is unique in its merging of the contemporary world with Irish folklore and fairy mythology. The teens who are Called and return are deformed and disfigured in terrifying ways, which only serves to increase the stakes as the intrigue and horror culminate in an action-packed finale.

Though the third person narrative style feels a bit clunky at times and often leaves character development somewhat shallow, the overall novel is one that will be certain to find an audience with horror and thriller lovers alike. I Recommend this book for sure, though with the caveat that those with a weak stomach may find certain descriptions a bit graphic.

(NOTE: This Review is from an Advance Reading Copy - Out August 30, 2016)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Living - Matt De La Peña

Image
The Living  recently received an Honor from the Pura Belpré committee. The award recognizes of a work which best portrays the Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth. As I was at the awards announcements, and having known people who served on the committee in the past, I was intrigued. I had read the winning title and the other honor titles, and was impressed with the choices. So here's my review of The Living : The novel begins with Shy, a young guy working for a snazzy cruise line, offering water to people on the Lido Deck of the ship to combat the heat. Everything is going pretty well until an older gentleman comes out and starts spouting of weird, disconcerting phrases: "You have seen the face of evil."Shy doesn't quite know what to think, so he moves on to a couple of ladies on the other side of the deck. Just as he's handing them their water bottles, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and realizes the old guy h...
Read more

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

Image
Max: Chill. Sports. Video games. Gay and not a big deal, not to him, not to his mom, not to his buddies. And a secret: An encounter with an older kid that makes it hard to breathe, one that he doesn't want to think about, ever. Jordan: The opposite of chill. Poetry. His "wives" and the Chandler Mall. Never been kissed and searching for Mr. Right, who probably won't like him anyway. And a secret: A spiraling out of control mother, and the knowledge that he's the only one who can keep the family from falling apart. Over the course of one summer, two boys will have to face their biggest fears and decide what they're willing to risk -- to get the thing they want the most. This is a phenomenal book, in my humble opinion. There aren't too many books dealing with male sexual abuse, particularly in YA. Sex and sexuality are messy parts of young adulthood, but what this book does really well is discuss consent and the ways in which physical cues can be misinte...
Read more

Girls Like Us - Gail Giles

Image
I have now gone out and made sure that I have all of the books longlisted for the National Book Award. I read and reviewed a number of these previously, so now I have five left to read and review. This is one of those five (but would I expect anything less from the fabulous team at Candlewick?) Girls Like Us  is a unique novel in a number of respects, most notably in the fact that both protagonists are identified (and self-identified) as mentally disabled in some way. Biddy has a learning disability that she was born with, while Quincy is a young girl who is disabled due to the fact that her mother's boyfriend hit her in the head with a brick, disfiguring her and damaging her brain. Once the two girls graduate from school, they move into a house together, becoming caregivers for both each other and an older woman, Elizabeth. The two must rely on each other for comfort, knowledge, and emotional strength, and Elizabeth manages to help them along the way. While I had moments of wo...
Read more