An engaging New Age adventure.
In this fantasy, a woman journeys among archetypes through lucid dreaming, gaining wisdom to help her defy a dangerous tyrant.
In a time that predates the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, a man named Ezra acquires skills and ideas from a portal, a desert well. The well gives him access to Ezra 2, who looks identical but lives in another galaxy; his people are highly advanced. Thanks to this guidance, Ezra’s achievements include inventing the wheel, the first human language, and various tools and weapons. Through a misunderstanding, his daughter Kora enters the well unshielded and is transformed, given great knowledge and a huge appetite for human suffering. Now calling herself Idolatra, she creates an army of human-animal hybrids to implement her cruel new world order, including “slavery…oppression, and organized religion.” Meanwhile, Ezra’s younger daughter, Niskala, becomes an inventor and healer, profiting from Ezra’s writings. At age 24, she falls sick, and her supposedly dead father appears, explaining that to understand her illness, she must practice lucid dreaming and encounter archetypical figures— including her shadow, a hero, a trickster, anima and animus, and a healer—to get a mandala that will lead her further. Over time, Niskala learns about her true self and her life’s mission, makes sacred vows to her helpers, and gathers wisdom until she’s faced with her hardest task of all: forgiving Idolatra. The framing story that starts off this novel isn’t exactly plausible; even Prometheus only stole fire, not (for example) the entire process needed to extract titanium. But once Vukov (Beyond the Wheel of History, 2018) begins Niskala’s journey, the fantastic elements fall more easily into place as a symbolic Jungian journey into the archetypal unconscious. The storytelling captures the authentic cadence of fairy tale or myth, as when Niskala repeats to her helpers: “My promise is sacred and I won’t ever break it.” These promises link to New Age ideas, such as positive visualization, animal welfare, and mindfulness, which will strike a chord in like-minded readers.
An engaging New Age adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9996836-3-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Skalium Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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