A dark fantasy sequel that enriches its predecessor.
This second volume of Arnold’s (Tapestry, 2012) medieval romance series explores the fate of Lord Tristam’s kidnapped wife and daughter.
When readers left Lord Tristam and Lady Grace of the kingdom of Blinth, they were ready to move beyond their respective, tragic pasts. Tristam had recovered from the loss of his wife and 9-year-old daughter to kidnappers in the aftermath of war with neighboring Polomia, and Grace no longer suffered from the trauma of sexual abuse. Then, Tristam’s daughter, Faith, miraculously returned to Blinth. This installment tells the tale of how she survived being abducted, along with her mother, by six greedy men on horseback. Near the border with Polomia, they were taken up the Boldengarth River into the heathen lands of Lolgothe. Constance bled to death after a beating, and Faith was sold into slavery. She became the property of a cult that worshipped a deity called The Beast and lived in a castle among other young virgins. Faith’s intelligence and sharp temper gained her respect from the Crone, who ran the sisterhood; nevertheless, years passed without any indication that Tristam was searching for her. Eventually, Faith’s stature in the cult grew, until she became known as the She-Beast. It’s to Arnold’s credit that she delivers a page-turner despite the fact that readers know the eventual outcome. The themes of tenderness and loss that Arnold developed in the previous novel are refreshed here; for example, when Faith’s mother is buried at sea, Faith tells readers, “Long after she passed from my sight, I clung to the rail searching the waves, adrift in my sorrow.” The cult’s inner workings, which help cover up the rapes of underage girls, are truly creepy (“The basin represents the womb,” Faith is told, “the birthplace of those who serve The Beast”). At her lowest point, Faith even seems to view her own body from the outside—a survival mechanism that Grace similarly uses in the first book. These and other intricate threads connect the two volumes, and Arnold builds great anticipation for the third.
A dark fantasy sequel that enriches its predecessor.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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