This inventive fairy tale with subtle Christian overtones includes enough suspenseful content to make it entertaining, in...
Prince Leo and ugly Rose Red make epic, separate journeys across kingdoms and to the dragon-infested doors of Death in this fantasy from an evangelical publisher.
The companion work to Heartless (2010), this illuminates different aspects of the same tale. Mysteriously veiled, kindhearted Rose Red dwells up the mountainside; her grotesque appearance frightens villagers. Leo, not just the wealthy boy he first appears, but in fact the Prince of Southlands, befriends her, yet many believe he’s actually bewitched, not making this choice of his own free will. Daylily, the lovely, spirited—but not especially sympathetic—maiden to whom Leo is promised, lacks the depth of the other two protagonists. After dark forces invade dreams of both Leo and Rose Red and then a dragon attacks and enslaves their land, each is faced with hard choices of the potential costs of their efforts to defeat the rising evil. They receive guidance from ethereal voices whose trustworthiness they must judge. From frequent allusions, it’s obvious that a complex back story provides depth to this faerie world, but readers must often guess at its components, making some aspects of the tale confusing. The conclusion leaves the story unfinished, setting up the next entry in the series.
This inventive fairy tale with subtle Christian overtones includes enough suspenseful content to make it entertaining, in spite of leaving too many somewhat-bewildering threads hanging. (Fantasy. 11-18)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7642-0782-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Bethany House
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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A product less than a book; those with not enough time on their hands might spend what they have more meaningfully elsewhere.
Treacly fable by pop inspirationalist Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie, 1997, etc.).
Dava Sobel and Longitude be damned, God doesn’t like people who measure things. Six thousand–odd years ago—is the date a nod to Archbishop Ussher and his proto-creationism?—a fine young fellow named Dor invents the world’s first clock and is banished to a cave for the affront, since only the deity is supposed to be concerned with such things, it being the days before hourly wage work and lawyers who bill in 15-minute increments. Dor now sits in a cave, “listening to something. Voices. Endless voices.” And what do you suppose those voices want? Yup, time. More of it. Endless time. Or at least a year or two. Writing in his customary staccato (“But Father Time is real. And, in truth, he cannot age.”), Albom gives Dor a chance to redeem himself by instructing two hapless earthlings—a man dying of cancer, a teenage girl in danger of dying by her own hand—in the meaning of life. The Little Prince it ain’t: Albom seems to have taken the template for his novel from a corporate report, each page studded with boldfaced passages that would seem to signal something momentous; a person in a hurry could well read just those boldfaced passages and emerge with a pretty good idea of the storyline, which is plenty predictable in any event. Still, there are a few useful takeaways, among them these: If you’re moribund, a pocket watch will cheer you right up; if you’re worried about the prospect of imminent demise, then remember that, as the old dude who cometh from God’s side sayeth, immortality “is not a gift.”
A product less than a book; those with not enough time on their hands might spend what they have more meaningfully elsewhere.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2278-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
"I'm Yakov Fixer... I'm the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive." He is childless, as the Talmud said, alive but dead, and deserted by his wife. He leaves his native shtetl for Kiev to pass for a few months as a goyim. Then he is arrested for having counterfeited a name and is later accused of killing a child in a ritual murder. This is the Russia of Nicholas the Second, the increasing irrationale of anti-Semitism, the prophetic "stink of future evil"— and there seems to be no question that this is Malamud's strongest book. There may be more question whether Yakov is one of his "saint-schlemiehls." He's a simple man, an ignorant man, but he reads a little (Spinoza) and he thinks. Even in his outraged innocence he knows that he is a "rational being and a man must try to reason." During these long months of interrogation and internment, he develops a certain philosophy of his own even though "it's all skin and bones." But speculate as he does, protest as he does, how accept the fact that he is one of the chosen people, chosen to represent the destiny and racial guilt of the Jews? As a Job, and several of Malamud's earlier characters have been termed Jobs, he repudiates suffering and eventually his hate is stronger than his fear... Anticipating all the inevitable comparisons to which the book is equal, Malamud's Fixer, less ideological than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, less symbolic than Kafka's Trial, has elements of each but a more exposed humanity than either of them. It is a work of commanding power.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1966
ISBN: 1412812585
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1966
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BOOK REVIEW
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