A series installment that further develops its sturdy characters, but still leaves a bounty of curious subplots unresolved.
In the third entry in Mayers’ (Violet Sapphire, 2016, etc.) fantasy series, a woman who belongs to a line of shape-shifting Hindu demons tells a story to her half-human offspring.
In a letter to her daughter Supriya, Shanti Patel hopes to reveal her child’s rather unorthodox beginnings. Supriya already knows that her mother is a Rakshasa—a demon—but she knows little about her human father, who left the family before she was born. Shanti’s tale, continued from the previous novel, begins in 1961, when her first daughter, Neha, was born. Shanti, afraid that she couldn’t control her fire-generating ability, left Neha and Neha’s 5,000-year-old, immortal father, Vibhishana, in India. She went to live in San Francisco with her mom, Sabrina, and worked as a doctor. Neha, meanwhile, traveled the world pursuing various studies, including anthropology, and ultimately came to the conclusion that a visit to Venus could explain the genesis of the Rakshasas to her. Later, Shanti reunited with her family but soon endured a great tragedy. She went on to meet a human, Raghav Ramachandran, whom she thought could help her escape her years of despair. She had a love for Raghav, especially for his pure soul—something that’s atypical in humans and contrasted with Shanti’s perpetual battle against a “dark voice” that stoked her fiery anger (and fiery powers). But Raghav refused to accept what she truly was, leading to a decision that had potentially lethal consequences. Although Mayers dives right into this third installment, her meticulous prose will slowly ease readers into the series, whether they’re new or returning. Shanti is a complex protagonist who uses her demon skills for good (her ability to understand all languages, for example, allows her to communicate with all her patients), but she’s also burdened with human struggles, such as sexual harassment at work. The lengthy section on Shanti and Raghav’s relationship slows the pace considerably, but it does effectively explain the bizarre circumstances surrounding Supriya’s birth. However, Mayers’ mostly solid prose occasionally slips in redundant descriptions (“incredibly epic”). As this novel is inspired by the Indian narrative poem, the Ramayana, the author graciously closes it, like the preceding two, with a glossary of Hindu references.
A series installment that further develops its sturdy characters, but still leaves a bounty of curious subplots unresolved.Pub Date: June 3, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grass Roof Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2016
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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