An ambitious, often engaging adventure through time.
Vonsik (Paths of Anguish, 2014) offers the second book in a fantasy series in which ancient and modern times converge.
Graduate student Nikki Ricks is onboard a ship called the Wind Runner, somewhere in the Caribbean. The craft has been traveling at high speeds in an attempt to evade United Nations ships. It’s soon apparent, though, that such maneuvers are for naught. It’s not long before futuristic goons known as Tyr Soldiers board the Wind Runner, looking to seize its strange cargo: two unconscious, seemingly non-human beings from a time long ago, named Rogaan and Aren. Just as all seems lost for Nikki and her fellow passengers, readers are transported back to ancient times—specifically, Rogaan and Aren’s era, which features ferocious beasts and complex civilizations. Here, the narrative picks up where the series’ first installment left off. Rogaan and others are on their way to free their parents from their captors in the city of Farratum. It’s a quest that doesn’t seem likely to succeed—particularly after Rogaan and company become prisoners themselves. There’s a sliver of hope, though, because Rogaan is occasionally capable of feats of great strength and violence. As he’s tested morally and physically, will he be able to save himself and the others from captivity? And what about Aren, a fellow prisoner who frequently sees spinning symbols in his head? Vonsik delivers a story that’s always alive with possibilities, and it keeps readers guessing about how it will link back to Nikki’s future narrative. Although it’s clear from the start that Aren and Rogaan will survive their ordeal, readers will wonder what it is about them that interests a sinister U.N. But even as these unanswered questions create a sense of urgency, some of the dialogue drags things down. Characters often announce their intentions, for example, as when a guard gives the order to imprison the heroes “and leave them be unless they cause more trouble.” The plot’s bigger picture, though, remains intriguing, and readers will be curious about the next installment.
An ambitious, often engaging adventure through time.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-578-17256-9
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Celestial Fury Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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