Another mix of action, adventure, teen angst, and literary allusion, although the results are less satisfying than before.
The latest installment in Hiatt’s (Hidden among Yourselves, 2015, etc.) Spell Weaver fantasy-adventure series.
After braving the Underworld on a seemingly impossible quest to obtain the lyre of Orpheus, fighting a stunning array of otherworldly and mythical beings along the way, Taliesin “Tal” Weaver and his allies could be forgiven for wanting a break. But this latest installment continues the frenetic action. Titania, queen of the English faeries, seeks Tal’s help to prove the innocence of her husband, Oberon, the faerie king who tried to kill Tal by sending him on the lyre quest. Despite this fact, Tal is willing to investigate, but his attention is soon diverted by the malignant machinations of Nicneven, the queen of the Scottish faeries. She’s allied herself with the forces of darkness and therefore wields tremendous power. There’s also a traitor in Tal’s midst whose identity will shake the adventurer to his very core. This latest novel adds more overt references to religion, particularly Christianity, as St. Brendan and St. Sebastian join in the action. The novel bounces between different characters’ points of view, which adds welcome depth, although their voices are sometimes too stridently different from one another. Overall, though, Hiatt’s engaging style remains strong, and his sharp wit continues to shine. Unfortunately, as in the previous novel, this installment sacrifices emotional complexity to plot twists and new adventures; as a result, romantic couplings and uncouplings among the team members provide little heat or interest. However, one beautiful scene, in which parents take time to secretly watch their resurrected son play baseball, stands as a reminder of how skillful Hiatt can be with nuanced interactions.
Another mix of action, adventure, teen angst, and literary allusion, although the results are less satisfying than before.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5171-2143-3
Page Count: 472
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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