Engaging characters and an imaginative plot make for a satisfying read.
Neftzger’s fantasy novel refreshes the conventions of the genre while meeting readers’ expectations of it.
As a lead fighter in the king’s war against “the sorcerer” and his shadows, Kelsey must obey her general’s orders and report back on the number of casualties in each battle. But when a usually mute shadow speaks to her, she knows something has changed. And another strange sight—an obscured figure with a shadow companion feeding pieces of parchment into a fire and whispering a strange spell-like poem into the flames—has her considering the rumors about a mysterious book that no one can read, one that supposedly holds the secret to winning the war. Although the general refuses to listen to her, Kelsey has resources outside the battlefield. Nicholas and his friends and teachers (and a talking gargoyle named Newton) from his old academy have gathered together by way of “scrying,” or peering into a magic bowl filled with water in which they can hear and sense but only sometimes see each other. Kelsey’s information gets the group wondering about how they might assist in the battle against the sorcerer’s illusions and deceptions, while Kelsey tries to decipher the words written on the parchment she steals from the strange figure. What they find will depend upon their understandings of magic, reality, and truth, and it will irrevocably alter each of them—and the world. Neftzger takes popular elements of modern fantasy—the battle between truth and artifice, a plucky yet troubled protagonist, a group of bookish friends, a talking nonhuman entity—and creates a new landscape that will delight genre fans. While the prose sometimes takes a stilted, expository tone, Neftzger often transcends it with fresh images: “What made everything worse were the burrs that blew onto the battlefield and stuck to the soldiers’ clothing. It was like a storm of little sticky balls that were somehow carried on the wind, but also heavy enough to weigh down the soldiers.” The climax, in particular, affirms the power of language and storytelling.
Engaging characters and an imaginative plot make for a satisfying read.Pub Date: March 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940894-17-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Fog Ink
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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