A cautionary dystopian tale about the redemptive qualities of retribution.
White (Strands, 2016) examines the narrow difference between justice and revenge in this paranormal thriller.
This novel’s reluctant antihero is Trevor, a blacksmith and family man living in a dystopian Western land. Trevor’s happy life is upended when his young son, Jake, contracts a terminal illness. Traditional medicine fails Jake, so desperate Trevor resorts to consulting with the mysterious Coma Witch. She heals Jake, but her price is that Trevor must kill another young boy, Kyle. When Trevor can’t bring himself to do that, the witch murders his family in the most gruesome way possible. This sets the ill-equipped Trevor on a path to retribution: “The souls of his family could not rest until he took vengeance upon the witch, and he could not contemplate how to accomplish that while haunted by their ghostly presence.” The witch taunts Trevor as she draws him across a spectral landscape littered with technologies past. During his pursuit, he meets a shaman, Rakesh, another victim of the witch, who trains him in the use of dark and light forces. His only requirement: “You never give up. You kill her or she kills you. Those are the only two outcomes.” Imbued with the darkta power, Trevor fights the witch’s many surrogates before confronting her in a final battle in her home territory. White admirably chronicles Trevor’s journey from innocent to someone possibly as ruthless as his quarry. As the witch explains, all is not as it seems: “The truth and power of the darkta? There is nothing to fear in it. Its chaos is that which allows light to shine and it is powerful at stripping away facades and illusions.” White’s strength lies in his descriptions of the scarred landscape that Trevor must cross in his quest (“At the road’s terminus stood a white church, black shutters hanging askew like broken teeth in a crooked grin”). But the drawback here involves the book’s grim plot, starting with familicide, then never getting any lighter, and ultimately conveying the message that revenge remains a double-edged sword. In addition, the story lacks a satisfying conclusion, after pages of doom and gloom.
A cautionary dystopian tale about the redemptive qualities of retribution.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944830-02-1
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Dark Revelations Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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