A quick fantasy read with a solid moral underpinning.
Galloway’s debut fantasy novella unveils a secret world replete with goblins, a fairy princess, an evil witch, and a magical wizard.
Eric is a human who’s long been fascinated by the myths of fairies, and he eventually goes to England to investigate the legends. After interviewing some locals, he sets up a fairy feast in the Forbidden Forest. The fairies join him for drunken cavorting and then bring him back to their land. His arrival triggers a long-dormant prophecy about the downfall of the wicked witch queen. Angelica, a fairy princess who was bred and raised by unicorns, has been training as a warrior, waiting for the right time to lead her people to reclaim their land from the queen. The people believe that Eric is a legendary wizard who’s key to the witch’s destruction, so Angelica and her team later rescue him from a deadly trap. They train him, and soon Eric and Angelica are working out plans to take down the queen. With ingenuity, supreme sacrifice, and teamwork, they kill the queen’s most powerful ally, the Collector. With him gone, they can breach the castle and reclaim the land for the people. The character of Angelica is a brave warrior princess who will provide a great role model for young girls; she isn’t afraid to fight or sacrifice for the greater good when necessary. Eric’s sense of adventure, even when facing his own death, is uplifting, and his resilience after losing his ties to the human world will remind readers that life can be wonderful if one lets go of preconceived notions about what’s truly important. The way the entire community works together, even to the extent of sacrificing their own lives, makes a powerful statement about solidarity and what it takes to defeat oppression. The fantasy world is rich and lush, showcasing Galloway’s fantastic imagination, and the pacing moves quickly forward. There are times when the prose is clichéd or awkward (“Needless to say, the spontaneous celebrations started popping up all over the place”), but the story is well-paced enough to transcend these moments.
A quick fantasy read with a solid moral underpinning.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4931-7584-0
Page Count: 50
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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