A serviceable ending to a historical fantasy series that shifts between provocatively imagined and culturally clueless.
The conclusion to Cato’s (Red Dust and Dancing Horses and Other Stories, 2017, etc.) Blood of Earth trilogy takes its magically gifted young heroine to Hawaii on a quest to understand both herself and her extraordinary powers so she can save the world and the people she loves.
After using her unusually potent earth-based magic to escape the clutches of Ambassador Blum, the ruthless kitsune who is trying to engineer the social and military ascendancy of Japan in Cato’s alternate 1906 world, Ingrid finds herself physically weakened and in constant pain. She flees to Hawaii on an airship in the company of her lover, Cy, and their friend Fenris, hoping to confirm her suspicion that she is descended from Madame Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, earth, and fire. Ingrid’s time on Hawaii features a fascinating descent into the crater of Kilauea alongside a group of bumbling tourists, an uncomfortable backdrop of entrenched racism, and a sobering reflection on the consequences of power and personal choices. When their airship leaves the islands, Ingrid and her companions find themselves thrust back into the world of political and military intrigue and must race to California and then on to Arizona to confront their enemies and save their friends. Cato’s alternate history, dominated by the Japanese-American alliance of the United Pacific and vicious racism against the Chinese, combines elements of actual history with the idea of an America influenced on every level, whether for good or ill, by a foreign culture. This interesting exercise of imagination is energized by Cato’s likable characters but reveals some awkward authorial privilege. Cultural details, other languages, and the experience of living as a person of color are all often deployed with enthusiasm that feels, at best, like a tourist’s appreciation and, at worst, like clumsy appropriation.
A serviceable ending to a historical fantasy series that shifts between provocatively imagined and culturally clueless.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269225-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.
Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.
The world’s not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call it Romeo and Juliet for the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text, The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, “She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it.” Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as “the man in the grey suit”? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise of teenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia’s magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53463-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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