When bandit attacks on traveling caravans grow worse, Capt. Auriga of the Eastern Trade Caravan Company talks of smashing...
In this fantasy novel, a simple caravan guard’s commitment to a dead friend leads him into a fight in an isolated town.
When bandit attacks on traveling caravans grow worse, Capt. Auriga of the Eastern Trade Caravan Company talks of smashing the bandits’ stronghold, located in an isolated valley quite close to his own home village. But when Auriga dies—by hitting his head during a race—the novel’s nameless narrator decides to continue this quest without Auriga. He finds a murkier situation in Dracheburg Valley than he expected, including a baron who long ago retreated from his responsibilities and an organized group of bandits who’ve recruited many erstwhile caravan guards. The town is populated by fearful or double-dealing people, including a shady sheriff and a saloon full of ne’er-do-wells. Meanwhile, a seemingly helpful criminal has a secret agenda regarding magical shards that are also the object of a wizard’s quest. (There’s even a major local infestation of bears.) The novel’s premise is an intriguing hybrid of fantasy and Western tropes, complete with an undertaker who measures the hero for a coffin. The author keeps the pace moving, and the characters’ “shades of gray” morality will likely keep readers interested—and unsure of whom to trust. However, the book presents some hurdles, including its language: Caravan guards in a medieval world use words like “ideology” and “feedback,” and when the narrator grows sick of the scheming around him, he tells the sheriff, “You and I are going to have a serious discussion,” sounding more like a TV dad than a swordsman. The novel also struggles with a rambling, chapterless structure, in which the narrator stumbles into one quest after another. The looseness may be intended to give the book a less epic and more realistic feeling, but it creates an environment in which the narrator doesn’t even mention his near-amnesia until page 59.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482026467
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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