Darkest Fear

December 15, 2013
The first book in Tiernan's Birthright series (Eternally Yours, 2012, etc.) is both predictable and unoriginal. Vivi Neves has known she's one of the haguari, an ancient race of shape-shifting jaguar people, since she was 13. After five years of fighting her parents' efforts to persuade her to embrace her heritage, Vivi is forced to change for the first time when she and her parents are attacked during a family picnic. Her parents end up dead, her father's heart missing. Among her parents' belongings, Vivi uncovers evidence of an aunt she never knew existed and heads to New Orleans to find her. Instead, she meets her 20-something cousin, Mateo, whose parents died a year and a half before, their hearts also taken. Vivi moves in with Mateo and his girlfriend and their many haguari friends, and she finds safety and normalcy in her barista job at a local cafe. There, she begins a will-they-won't-they relationship with moody Rafael, the manager. Vivi's first-person narration is an exhausting mix of back story and summary that prevents the plot from developing. She thinks and speaks in ellipses and speculative questions, and her snarky voice is whiny rather than quirky. Her jaguar voice is a stream-of-consciousness jumble of broken and run-on sentences in present tense, and the move from one voice to the other is jarring. The anticlimactic ending will leave readers too frustrated to read subsequent installments to find out who is kidnapping haguari and taking their hearts. This lackluster addition to the bloated teen-paranormal-romance genre has nothing new to offer. (Paranormal romance. 13-18)

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March 1, 2014

Gr 9 Up-Tiernan wastes no time delving into the action in this new series. Within 25 pages, 18-year-old Vivi's parents have been viciously murdered, with her father's heart ripped from his body by what Vivi and her aunt Juliana can only assume was one of their own kind. Their own kind being Haguari, or the "Jaguar people." Vivi has spent the majority of her life denying her heritage, but with the mystery shrouding her parents' deaths and her newfound family in New Orleans, immersing herself in the Haguari way of the life may be the only way to solve the murders. The narrative moves swiftly, engaging readers with a rich backstory of the Haguari people and the omnipresent fear and apprehension that accompanies Vivi throughout the story. This is no Shiver(Scholastic, 2009) by Maggie Stiefvater, although the writing is equally strong. Darkest Fear is not a paranormal romance. Rather, this is about family, self-discovery, and accepting one's differences whether they are inherited or self-determined. Those looking for interspecies love will likely be disappointed, though the groundwork is certainly there for a love interest or two in the next installment. Libraries in which paranormal romance and fantasy are circulating strongly would be wise to purchase.-Jennifer Furuyama, Pendleton Public Library, OR

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2014
Grades 9-12 Vivi seems like an average 18-year-old girl: rebellious (wanting to be the opposite of her parents), awkward (with boys), and gossipy (with her best girlfriend, Jennifer). But she cannot ignore that she and her parents, who have been mysteriously murdered, are haguaripart of an ancient religion whose followers can turn into jaguars. The sudden deaths of her parentsleave her with many unanswered questions, prompting an excursion to New Orleans. There, she meets family as well as a coffee shop owner with dreamy eyes, and she is introduced to horrific truths that reveal urgent dangers. Vivi's inner self has always felt embraced by the jaguar gods, but now she must learn to channel that protection for the safety of her family. With this first entry in the Birthright series, Tiernen captures Vivi's emotional growth through internal dialogue as both human and jaguar, and she employs a raw writing style to explore a struggle that we all facediscovering what it means to be human.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)