A light read that suffers from heavy-handed prose but may offer an interesting new world to readers who enjoy the flavor of...
In a debut that promises to be the first of two novels set in this world, Cato introduces a likable heroine and a serviceably imagined steampunk fantasy painted with broad strokes of magic and political intrigue.
Octavia Leander is a young healer, a “medician,” whose magical ability to heal is extraordinary even in a world flush with airships, chimeras, and the expected steampunk trappings of clockwork science and unusual magic systems. Her journey to a new life as the resident healer of a small country town takes her onto the airship Argus, where unlikely plots and assassination attempts pull her deep into the troubles of a country suffering from the effects of war. The companions she collects in her travels are, unsurprisingly, not what they seem, and Cato employs many conventions of fantasy adventure to set the story in motion: a kidnapped princess, elite spies, a patchwork religion and an enthusiastic embrace of simple romance. The characters Octavia meets are appealing in an exaggerated way; the plot is often graceless but has the undeniable ability to encourage the dogged turning of pages. While the narration is sometimes tripped up by awkward shifts into Octavia’s interior monologue and swathes of absurd description—like the comparison of a woman’s bosom to “planets of flesh that hovered above an unblemished satin sky”—it gains a prickly insistence from a depiction of magic that depends on sacrifice as well as power. The magic in this world does not always arrive without a price, and that gives it a depth that would otherwise be missing.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231384-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.
Manic parodist Moore, fresh off a season in 1947 San Francisco (Noir, 2018), returns with a rare gift for Shakespeare fans who think A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be perfect if only it were a little more madcap.
Cast adrift by pirates together with his apprentice, halfwit giant Drool, and Jeff, his barely less intelligent monkey, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, jester to the late King Lear, washes ashore in Shakespeare’s Athens, where Cobweb, a squirrel by day and fairy by night, takes him under her wing and other parts. Soon after he encounters Robin Goodfellow (the Puck), jester to shadow king Oberon, and Nick Bottom and the other clueless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisby in a nearby forest before they present it in celebration of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the captive Amazon queen who’s captured his heart, Pocket (The Serpent of Venice, 2014, etc.) finds Robin fatally shot by an arrow. Suspected briefly of the murder himself, he’s commissioned, first by Hippolyta, then by the unwitting Theseus, to identify the Puck’s killer. Oh, and Egeus, the Duke’s steward, wants him to find and execute Lysander, who’s run off with Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, instead of marrying Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius. As English majors can attest, a remarkable amount of this madness can already be found in Shakespeare’s play. Moore’s contribution is to amp up the couplings, bawdy language, violence, and metatextual analogies between the royals, the fairies, the mechanicals, his own interloping hero, and any number of other plays by the Bard.
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches are back (after Lasher, 1993), this time to help a lovelorn mystical being overcome a curse. Ashlar lives high above Manhattan, where he runs his hugely successful doll company. Ash is one of the Taitos, a race of tall, superintelligent, humanlike beings whose existence predates Western civilization. Ash unintentionally sold his race down the pike in a bloody and ill-fated attempt to embrace Christianity back in the sixth century, and he has since roamed the earth, doomed by his martyred lover's curse that he shall live forever loveless. Meanwhile, down in New Orleans, the Mayfair clan is still recovering from the unpleasantness chronicled in the last book, in which Lasher (who, it turns out, was a malevolent Taitos) raped Rowan Mayfair and almost killed her. Further complicating things is the pregnancy of nubile young cousin Mona, knocked up by Rowan's husband, Michael. But Rowan, being a Mayfair, shrugs off this latest incestuous episode and embarks with her hubby on an adventure in Europe to discover the root of the recent tumult. There they meet Ash, who is trying to find a fertile soul mate and put the Taltos house back in order. During their absence, Mona, after a gestation period of two weeks, gives birth to Morrigan, a Taltos born of recessive genes who walks out of the womb looking like Ann-Margret and possessing that famous Taltos intelligence. Seeing Mona's attachment to the apparently good Morrigan, Michael and Rowan reluctantly let this one live, hopefully to love, mate, and produce more...sequels. Like much of Rice's work, this is a beautifully written, if somewhat overwrought, story in which the action takes a good 150 pages or so to really start to hum. Still, this third (of a promised two, for those keeping count) Mayfair Witches novel clocks in at a "trim" 480 pages, which qualifies this as minute-Rice, certain to be hungrily devoured by her legions of fans.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42573-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
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