Engaging and fun samurai adventures with a captivating cast.
A debut novel focuses on a mythical Japanese hero.
Tarō is the young son of the samurai Lord Takeda. On his seventh birthday, an important day for samurai boys, Tarō is given a sword by his father as part of the celebration, which includes a visit to the Fuji Hachiman Shrine. The sword will be presented to and blessed by Hachiman no Kami, the God of War. But Tarō’s life is turned upside down when his family is ambushed at the temple by rival warlord Lord Monkey. The boy’s parents are killed, but Tarō manages to escape and is eventually rescued by a witch, who becomes his surrogate mother. Tarō’s idyllic life in the enchanted woods, spent in the company of talking animals, continues for years. He grows up to be a powerfully built young warrior with no memory of his previous existence. Then, Tarō saves the life of the samurai warlord Lord Tokugawa from a sorcerous kappa. When Tarō receives an invitation to live in the leader’s castle as a warrior, he eagerly accepts in order to rejoin the human world. He embarks on a daring journey during which he will learn about the samurai and seek revenge. In the company of the samurai Lady Kamehime and his animal companion, Tanuki, Tarō ultimately becomes embroiled in a political struggle for the throne, with the emperor’s life at stake. Spruell’s old-fashioned story with an omniscient narrator is infused with humor and the inspirational pathos of a brave protagonist on a dangerous odyssey. The author reimagines folktales about three different Japanese heroes named Tarō and inserts them into one striking narrative. Spruell cleverly interweaves Tarō’s story with a tale of 16th-century feudal Japan and its three great fabled warlords. The addition of samurai Kamehime to the vibrant cast of characters is a bold move that pays off. Beautiful, stylized images by debut illustrator Outlaw enhance this enjoyable and inventive tale.
Engaging and fun samurai adventures with a captivating cast.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73572-921-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Out of the Blue Productions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For latter-day D&D fans, a long-awaited moment. For the rest—well, maybe J.K. Rowling will write another book after all.
A walloping sword-and-sorcery fest from Rothfuss, the second volume in a projected trilogy (The Name of the Wind, 2007).
Readers of that debut—and if you weren’t a reader of the first volume, then none of the second will make any sense to you—will remember that its protagonist, Kvothe (rhymes with “quoth”), was an orphan with magical powers and, as the years rolled by, the ability to pull music out of the air and write “songs that make the minstrels weep.” The second volume finds him busily acquiring all kinds of knowledge to help his wizardly career along, for which reason he is in residence in a cool college burg, “barely more than a town, really,” that has other towns beat by a league in the arcane-knowledge department, to say nothing of cafés where you can talk elevated talk and drink “Veltish coffee and Vintish wine,” as good post-hobbits must. For one thing, the place has a direct line to a vast underground archive where pretty much everything that has ever been thought or imagined is catalogued; for another thing, anyone who is anyone in the world of eldritch studies comes by, which puts Kvothe in close proximity to the impossibly beautiful fairy Felurian, who makes hearts go flippity-flop and knows some pretty good tricks in the way of evading evil. Evil there is, and in abundance, but who cares if you’re dating such a cool creature? Rothfuss works all the well-worn conventions of the genre, with a shadow cloak here and a stinging sword there and lots of wizardry throughout, blending a thoroughly prosaic prose style with the heft-of-tome ambitions of a William T. Vollmann. This is a great big book indeed, but not much happens—which, to judge by the success of its predecessor, will faze readers not a whit.
For latter-day D&D fans, a long-awaited moment. For the rest—well, maybe J.K. Rowling will write another book after all.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7564-0473-4
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: DAW/Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
SEEN & HEARD
Tremendous fun.
A woman trapped in a time loop decides she’s had enough of trying to win an unwinnable war in Wexler’s fantasy comedy.
Davi is stuck in a time loop. Though she’s from our world, her loop starts when the wizard Tserigern wakes her from a magical pool and tells her she’s been summoned to save the humans of the Kingdom from the wilders, magical creatures like orcs and other monsters. The wilders are led by the Dark Lord, and though the Dark Lord might be any number of figures, what matters is that the wilders destroy the humans over and over and over. Which means that Davi has died and woken back up in that pool so many times that she’s been alive for thousands of years and knows the fantasy world inside and out. After dying yet again in the Dark Lord’s dungeons, Davi decides she’s had enough. Clearly the war against the wilders is unwinnable. Instead, Davi decides she’ll change sides to become the Dark Lord herself, and maybe be on the winning side for a change. Though Davi doesn’t remember much of her life on Earth, she does remember plenty of pop culture references, and her frenetic sense of humor is both wonderfully sharp and probably an accurate depiction of how someone’s mind might crack a bit after reliving the same life hundreds of times. The fact that Davi’s life doesn’t reset until she has died adds dimension to the time-loop trope, making it more like a video game, where she might make it for a few years or a few hours depending on what she chooses to do. As Davi moves forward in the only version of her life that she hasn’t yet tried, fighting with the wilders, she forms new kinds of bonds and finds exciting new mysteries about the fantasy world where she’s spent multiple lifetimes.
Tremendous fun.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780316392204
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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