Next of Kin

Anthem, a strange girl who claims to be fourteen-year-old Nicholas's sister, kidnaps him to reunite with their real father and a brother who shares special powers, but when they arrive at sinister "Uncle" Titus's home, Nick realizes that terror lies in store. A first novel.

Fresh language, eye-catching imagery and no-brakes action distinguish this debut suspense thriller, which is marred only by the failure of the second half to deliver fully on the promises of the first. An October morning in Michigan finds 14-year-old Nicholas Danzig eating Frosted Mini-Wheats while his parents field a call from "great uncle" Titus Heller. That same morning Nicholas is kidnapped on the way to school by Anthem, 19, who tells him she once had wings and that she is his long-lost sister who wants to reunite him with their brother Ovid and "real" father Jack. She promises a meteorological cataclysm when Nicholas meets Ovid in California, where they're headed, and indeed the weather turns wintry as they meander "west." Only when Anthem drives into Lake Superior does her destination--and the Lewis Carroll-like bent of her badly damaged mind--begin to become clear. Presumed dead, Nicholas is imprisoned by Titus, a wheelchair-bound, pure oxygen-dependent tycoon. The boy learns Titus's nefarious secrets and the true nature of his business and their relationship. Although the villain's motives and madness never quite ring true and Anthem's fate keenly disappoints, Schreiber's often mesmerizing tale showcases a talent that's sure to ripen.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A 14-year-old boy, impatient with his family's suburban rituals, gets more than his share of the unusual when he's kidnapped by a girl claiming to be his sister. And that isn't all Nicholas Danzig hears from the abductor who calls herself Anthem: she insists that Nicholas himself is adopted; that he's really the son of a Boston jazzman called Saint Jack; that he was placed with the Danzigs by old family friend ``Uncle'' Titus Heller; that Nicholas, whose real name is Virgil, has an older brother, Ovid, with whom he has a mystic bond that explains why--even though Anthem is driving him from Michigan to California--they're running into increasingly heavy snowstorms; and that, before Jack and Titus cut them off, she'd sprouted a pair of wings. Anthem is not only quite a piece of work, but also the author's cunning strategy for spinning ever wilder variations on Nicholas' wild odyssey while keeping the horror that waits at her destination mysterious. You may not realize just how important the mystery is until shortly after the pair reach Anthem's destination, when Nicholas figures out how much of her story is true and the novel immediately takes a nosedive into escape-from-the-bogeyman territory. Even at his most conventional, first-novelist Schreiber has a sharp eye for the kinds of weakness that keep people in thrall to the bad guys. But nothing about Nicholas' peril is equal to his demented, tender abductor's unwitting hints at just how disturbing it's going to be. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.