A winning first release that admirably blends mortality, adventure, organizational politics and even a bit of love.
Fields’ imaginative debut novel features an engrossing, modern world of life and death that will speak to fans of fantasy and secret societies.
Cornelius Hoyt is a simple Colonial American farm boy turned Grim Reaper Cadet. But gentle Cornelius slowly realizes that he’s a bad fit for this kind of work: “The Event left Cornelius heartsick. He departed the scene afraid he had made a grave mistake when he joined the cadets.” While Cornelius wrestles with his identity crisis, reaperdom is undergoing a similar struggle between the Provocateurs, who promote evolution by the assemblage, and the Traditionalists, who resist change: “An increasing number of reapers viewed technology as an existential threat and advocated drastic measures, specifically stealing the souls of inventors, innovators, and scientists, but the concept was unpalatable to the majority and impossible to implement without damaging the basic tenets of the Society of Death.” Evil Traditionalist Roger Mortimer, aided by his secret spies, seeks to devastate and remake the world with himself as ruler. Poor, conflicted Cornelius finds that he’s embroiled in this internecine battle whether or not he wants to be, and he tries to escape from this domain in which he doesn’t feel he belongs. While doing so, he discovers Kao, a kindred soul, and they try to find a safe place to call their own. For his part, “Cornelius only wished they were able to enjoy it without the constant fear of Expulsion.” In his dynamic style, Fields, using his background in cultural anthropology, provides a well-developed hierarchy for a group only hinted at by most mythologies. He skillfully balances Cornelius’ soul-searching with the larger threat looming within the organization, all the while effectively drawing characters that help make the fantastic seem believable.
A winning first release that admirably blends mortality, adventure, organizational politics and even a bit of love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9890067-0-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Clonakilty Publications
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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