The fourth and last book in the Far Kingdoms series—former co-author Chris Bunch having taken his business elsewhere—is a sequel to The Warrior's Tale (1994) and features the same protagonist and narrator—the warrior and sorceress Rali Emilie Antero. Rali emerges from a 50-year entombment in ice to enjoy further adventures and a final showdown with her old foe, the irresistible succubus Novari, who has seized the city Orissa and exterminated all the other Anteros, save the mystical child Emilie. Stands alone, more or less, but series fans are the intended, and most likely, recipients.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-345-39459-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
Fierce, poetic, uncompromising.
This extremely urban fantasy, a love/hate song to and rallying cry for the author’s home of New York, expands her story “The City, Born Great” (from How Long ’Til Black Future Month, 2018).
When a great city reaches the point when it's ready to come to life, it chooses a human avatar, who guides the city through its birthing and contends with an extradimensional Enemy who seeks to strike at this vulnerable moment. Now, it is New York City’s time to be born, but its avatar is too weakened by the battle to complete the process. So each of the individual boroughs instantiates its own avatar to continue the fight. Manhattan is a multiracial grad student new to the city with a secret violent past that he can no longer quite remember; Brooklyn is an African American rap star–turned–lawyer and city councilwoman; Queens is an Indian math whiz here on a visa; the Bronx is a tough Lenape woman who runs a nonprofit art center; and Staten Island is a frightened and insular Irish American woman who wants nothing to do with the other four. Can these boroughs successfully awaken and heal their primary avatar and repel the invading white tentacles of the Enemy? The novel is a bold calling out of the racial tensions dividing not only New York City, but the U.S. as a whole; it underscores that people of color are an integral part of the city’s tapestry even if some White people prefer to treat them as interlopers. It's no accident that the only White avatar is the racist woman representing Staten Island, nor that the Enemy appears as a Woman in White who employs the forces of racism and gentrification in her invasion; her true self is openly inspired by the tropes of the xenophobic author H.P. Lovecraft. Although the story is a fantasy, many aspects of the plot draw on contemporary incidents. In the real world, White people don’t need a nudge from an eldritch abomination to call down a violent police reaction on people of color innocently conducting their daily lives, and just as in the book, third parties are fraudulently transferring property deeds from African American homeowners in Brooklyn, and gentrification forces out the people who made the neighborhood attractive in the first place. In the face of these behaviors, whataboutism, #BothSides, and #NotAllWhitePeople are feeble arguments.
Fierce, poetic, uncompromising.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-50984-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
..... casts a somber spell, death is a familiar figure, and fancied fears assume a devastating reality. This for Mr. Harris, who broods about his bones while his flesh wastes away; for a young mother destroyed by The Little Assassin she has delivered; for a young woman in Mexico, whose visit to a catacomb of the unburied dead vitiates her in the knowledge that she will be The Next In Line. There's the amorphous horror in The Jar; The Dwarf who hopes to find the contradiction of his deformity in the distortion of a mirror; the weird, winged assemblage of Homecoming, etc. etc.... The chilling imaginative virtuosity, the malignant momentum of terror, the occasional tenderness give these short stories a real superiority.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1955
ISBN: 0345407857
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1955
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