Release Date: June 18, 2019
Publisher: Soho Press
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Description
“Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rockstar family in one of the city’s storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas’s live-in governess and quickly finds her place in their household, which is relaxed and happy despite the band’s larger-than-life fame.
But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas accidentally summon a pair of ancient creatures devoted to avenging the wrongs of Xochi’s adolescence. She would do anything to preserve her new life, but with the creatures determined to exact vengeance on those who’ve hurt her, no one is safe—not the family she’s chosen, nor the one she left behind.”
My Thoughts
Keil doesn’t shy away from the realities of Xochi and Leviticus’ relationship. He pursues her and she pursues him (as much as a teen girl can pursue an adult man). In age she’s still a child, but by past experiences she thinks she is a world-weary adult. In truth she’s neither; she’s an adolescent caught between the past, present, and future and unequipped to understand any of it. She makes bad choices while living with her abuser in Humboldt County and makes even more bad choices while living with Leviticus in San Francisco. But Keil makes it clear that her actions don’t mean she deserves what happens to her or that she’s “asking for it.”…
Read the rest of this review at Tor.com.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
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