House of Reckoning

August 24, 2009
Set in Vermont, this supernatural thriller from bestseller Saul (Faces of Fear
) updates but adds nothing new to a traditional story. Six months after 14-year-old Sarah Crane's mother dies from cancer, Sarah's father, Ed, accidentally kills a man in a fight. On top of that, a drunken Ed hits Sarah with his truck while he's behind the wheel. After Ed goes to prison for manslaughter, Sarah, whose leg was badly injured in the truck accident, is placed with a foster family. Mitch and Angie Garvey and their two teenage children treat Sarah like Cinderella, expecting her to serve meals and do all the chores. Meanwhile, word of Sarah's circumstances makes her an outcast at her new school. Only two people reach out to her: Bettina Philips, an art teacher labeled a witch, and fellow student Nick Dunnigan, who's also isolated by his peers and prone to scary visions. Needless to say, the mystical abilities Sarah discovers she possesses come in handy in turning the tables.

October 1, 2009
Hit-or-miss horrormeister Saul (Faces of Fear, 2008, etc.) drops a vulnerable teenager into a new town with no friends but a schizophrenic, a witch and a big old house.

Drunkenly mourning his wife's recent death, Ed Crane kills a man in a bar fight and then runs down his 14-year-old daughter Sarah as she bikes along the highway in search of him. Ed lands in jail; Sarah, who now has metal plates in her leg and hip, is placed with a foster family in nearby Warwick, Vt. Though her well-meaning social worker can't see it, the placement is a nightmare. Zach Garvey is a lout, his sister Tiffany a selfish brat who supports her shopping by stealing and selling Sarah's medication, their mother Angie a smirking religious hypocrite, their father Mitch a greedy bully who just happens to work at the prison where Ed is doing time for manslaughter. Like a modern-day fairy-tale heroine, Sarah is alone and helpless until she meets Nick Dunnigan, who hears voices and sees visions of his teenage tormenters bursting into flames, and Bettina Philips, the herbalist/astrologer/art teacher who recognizes Sarah's rare and uncanny gifts. Without ever having seen it, Sarah draws a perfect likeness of Bettina's home, a former asylum for the criminally insane, as it looked 100 years ago; then she begins a series of drawings and paintings that precisely match the voices and images in Nick's head. Anyone who's survived adolescence will take a certain pleasure in watching Saul turn all the normal fears, competitions and terrors of teenagers into supernaturally tinged Grand Guignol.

The storytelling is strenuously unnuanced but undeniably powerful as it brings to vivid life an adolescent's zero-sum view of moral realities.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2009
Its teens-in-peril once more for Saul, and if this variation on his staple scenario begs several questions about its narrative logic, at least its less sluggish than The Face of Fear (2008). After her newly widowed father runs her down while driving home drunk, 14-year-old Sarah Crane is placed with the foster family from Hellfundamentalist Christians of the sadistic, spiteful, and hypocritical typein the town that hosts the prison in which Ed Crane is doing time. Warwick, Vermont, is full of people like the Garveys, although their sanctimoniousness doesnt quite extend to their children, who are merely mean and make school nearly as miserable as home for Sarah. She befriends Nick Dunnigan, however, whose psychological problemshe hears voiceshave made him another target of their evil high-school peers, and finds a mentor in art teacher Bettina Phillips, who immediately appreciates Sarahs precocious talent but whom Warwickians think is a witch. Moreover, Bettina lives in one spooky house, the longtime family manse, which once domiciled the superintendent of an asylum for the criminally insaneher great-great grandfather. When the outcasts and the house all come together, the supposedly stable structure becomes quasi-animate with great forcefulness, and the bad guys get their just deserts. Read this as quickly as possible, dont ask questions, and you may be quite entertained.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)