Fans of heavy metal–style sword slashing nastiness will take to this outlandish adventure.
An illustrated novel about an unlikely hero and his adventures in a violent future.
From debut authors Zielinski and Stempka comes Boldizar Halfwater, a handyman drug addict who, at 5 feet 6 inches tall and “barely weighing over 100 pounds when fully clothed…was not an imposing figure.” Boldizar lives alone in a dusty, humble dwelling, fueling his days with cocaine and general indifference. “Simply put—he was lazy, and preferred to spend more time relaxing with a cool drink and a pile of drugs than toiling in his workshop fixing broken items.” After fixing a mechanical dog washer and polisher for local tough man Billy Von Bixby, Boldizar’s lazy life abruptly changes. Upon delivery of the repaired item, Boldizar inexplicably murders Billy with a pocket knife. Why would Boldizar murder one of the most dangerous men in town? Even he isn’t sure. Fortunately for Boldizar, his friend Reginald is around with his horse Alabama Cush. The two escape to the woods, where they are pursued by the corpulent, cannibalistic Bittertight (“Small pieces of food spit and hopped out of his flapping jaws like fleas from a dogs bark”), head of the Goughnuts Guard. Once out of immediate danger, Boldizar learns that the dog polisher contains a glowing blue pendant, leading him to ask, “What kind of fucked up jewelry is this?” So begins a quest to find out just what kind of jewelry it is while avoiding capture from the feared Bittertight. Encountering everything from a powerful gladiator to a Screamicorn, a “demonically hellish red horse” that kills its victims with a scream, the hero has multiple zany, gory exploits. The overall outrageousness of events will excite readers unperturbed by exploding body parts and allusions to crude sexual practices (“Usually he would look to mastiffs to service his sexual needs since they couldn’t judge him, and the rules of bestiality were long since forgotten”). While Boldizar himself does not prove the most intriguing hero, his story involves enough peripheral inventiveness to please readers of similar works.
Fans of heavy metal–style sword slashing nastiness will take to this outlandish adventure.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499372342
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.
This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery.
Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition...and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. Unsure of how to mix with the necromancers and cavaliers from the other Houses, Gideon must decide whom among them she can trust—and her doubts include her own necromancer, Harrow, whom she’s loathed since childhood. This intriguing genre stew works surprisingly well. The limited locations and narrow focus mean that the author doesn’t really have to explain how people not directly attached to a necromantic House or the military actually conduct daily life in the Empire; hopefully future installments will open up the author’s creative universe a bit more. The most interesting aspect of the novel turns out to be the prickly but intimate relationship between Gideon and Harrow, bound together by what appears at first to be simple hatred. But the challenges of Canaan House expose other layers, beginning with a peculiar but compelling mutual loyalty and continuing on to other, more complex feelings, ties, and shared fraught experiences.
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31319-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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