An action-packed but troubled weaving of historical fiction and fantasy that labors under the burdens of the points it tries...
Chamberlin’s (The Sword and the Well, 2014, etc.) first book in a new historical series follows a warrior woman’s search for honor and identity.
Brynhild is determined to escape the traditions and deprivations of her Angles tribe after her second cousin and best friend, Uddrun, takes Brynhild’s place as a ritual sacrifice to cleanse the pain, loss and anger that have resulted from a hard winter. Brynhild gets her wish when she’s chosen to become a Valkyrie, a warrior woman who takes the souls of dead fighters to Valhalla. After taking up her mantle as a Valkyrie, Brynhild begins to chafe at yet another set of customs and restrictions, as her increased power can only be used at the direction of Odin. Meanwhile, Signy, the daughter of a warrior formerly favored by Odin, is married to the brutal Ermenaric, king of the Goths. Lonely and pregnant, she struggles to make an acceptable life for herself in the harsh land of her husband. At the same time that Brynhild begins to question more and more of her orders, Signy finds faces from her past that lead her down a new path. An air of mystery hangs over the novel, as magic and storytelling seem to be indistinguishable. It’s never clear if Odin is truly a god or simply a clever, charismatic man who has manipulated mythology to gain power. Though the novel does an excellent job showing many different forms of femininity and highlighting women’s struggles with identity, the story often seems heavy-handed in its focus on gender roles. Actions, occupations and physical features are constantly delineated into categories of male and female, with much discussion of characters fitting into, or rebelling against, their gender roles. Rather than let the details speak for themselves, Chamberlin forcibly connects everything to her dominant theme.
An action-packed but troubled weaving of historical fiction and fantasy that labors under the burdens of the points it tries to make.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1938758034
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Penumbra Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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