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rophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink will release from Little, Brown in August 2009. In it, readers are taken to late 19th-century Upstate New York where we meet wealthy heiress Lia, whose father has just died under mysterious circumstances. 16 year old Lia, along with her twin sister Alice and younger brother Henry, are left under the guardianship of their spinster Aunt in their family mansion. Soon after her father’s death, Lia’s life takes a sharp turn for the worse as she discovers that she is caught up in a prophecy that has spanned generations of her family, and it may now be the time for the legions of Hell that have been waiting to be freed upon Earth to at last be released.
Prophecy of the Sistersis the first in a proposed trilogy, and Zink spends a great deal of the book setting the stage and establishing the background for the mystery that engulfs Lia as soon as a mysterious mark appears on her wrist. Her relationship withher stoic, controlling sister Alice becomes frightning and life-threatening as Alice seems to be possessed by evil spirits and forces Lia to hide her queries, discoveries, and suspicions from her. After discovering a cryptic prophecy about a Gate, a Guardian and the end of days in her father’s study, Lia spends the novel seeking people in her small town who have knowledge of the ancient prophecy and who are intimately linked with it, even though they didn’t know up to now how or why.
Zink opens the novel with the dark and spooky tone of a Victorian Gothic novel and weaves in just enough mystery and horror. She culls together myths and legends from multiple sources to create a prophecy with Biblical portents but in this first book doesn’t completely flesh it out. The supernatural elements, coupled with the spunky teen female leads is reminiscent of Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy, however there’s less action and more scene-setting in Prophecy than in A Great and Terrible Beauty. There’s a lot of room for character and plot development in books 2 & 3 and it will be interesting to see where Zink and Lia take us.
- Posted by Cori