Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Tara Moss, Echo, $29.99.
Tara Moss, documentary maker and presenter, human rights advocate, novelist and former model, brings her trademark morbid and lifelong love of the paranormal to the fashion world. However, there is a twist.
In The Cobra Queen we discover moving to Manhattan is never simple for a normal girl, and as Pandora English is discovering, she’s not exactly as normal as she thought. She’s starting to discover powers she never knew existed, much less thought she possessed. Her world is turned upside down.
Until you know the relevant haunts in New York, you don’t know the city’s fashion world. The new life for Pandora is a far cry from her humble upbringing in sleepy Gretchenville with a population of 3,999.
By day she works as an assistant at a fashion magazine in trendy Soho. By night she lives with her great aunt Celia in a rambling neogothic Victorian mansion in Spektor – a Manhattan suburb that’s not on any map.
Pandora has discovered she is the chosen one, the Seventh Daughter of a Seventh Daughter, and during the impending Revolution of the Dead, she alone will have the power to save all life as we know it.
Pandora’s relationship to her spirit guide, Lieutenant Luke, is intensifying. She’s had to grapple with ghosts, vampires and necromancers. Now, with the Blue Moon approaching and a new exhibition opening at The Met, which celebrates an ancient female pharaoh done wrong in antiquity, powerful forces threaten to upend the balance of life and death.
This fourth novel in the Pandora English series is an interesting supernatural adult romance exuding female liberation and candour.
