Saturday, April 18, 2009

Keturah and Lord Death

Martine Leavitt
Front Street, 2006

Sixteen-year-old Keturah Reeve has one simple dream - a true love of her own, a cottage of her own, and a sweet wee babe of her very own. But one day she wanders into the woods and is lost. When Death comes for her as a cold and comely young lord, she pleads for her life with a tale like the ones she tells around the village fire. Intrigued by her story, Death grants her another day in which she must find her true love or be taken.

So begins this lyrical fable, a story of life and death, hope and transformation. I marvel that so much wisdom and beauty can be packed in two hundred pages. Keturah's shabby village throbs with life, full of characters that seem to have been plucked from a fairy tale but then given real-life hearts and souls. The prose is exquisite - Keturah has the eye of a poet and the voice of a storyteller. Her quest to find an everlasting love takes so many turns it kept me guessing right up until the end. After closing the book I felt like I'd woken from a dream that meant more than I was ready to understand.

Highly recommended for readers age twelve and up.

3 comments:

  1. ARGH! I want to read this one SO MUCH but I have yet to get my hands on a copy!! Glad you liked it..hope it's worth my wait!

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  2. One of my friends recommended it to me in an interesting way. She had kindly read my latest work in progress and had told me that mine was the best book she had read in a long time.

    "Really?" I felt deeply pleased, of course, but I had to ask, "What was the last book you read that was better?"

    "A few months ago I read Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt."

    Can't compete with that!

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  3. WOW!! That's pretty awesome! Your friend totally has great taste. :)

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