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
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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