A stunning fantasy debut.
Lay’s debut novel recounts the story of a writer and the fantasy world he’s struggling to create.
Half of this book details the life of Jack Ampong, a frustrated author who’s trying to write a Tolkien-esque fantasy novel, composed of several interconnected short stories. He quit working as an analytics manager to write full time while his wife, Sarah D’Albero-Ampong, a former artist, supports them financially by making sports collectibles, which puts a strain on their marriage. The narrative moves back and forth between the two and includes newspaper articles, text messages, Facebook posts, and more. These tell stories of such things as Sarah’s stellar high school basketball career and details about Jack’s writing difficulties. The other half of the novel is comprised of Jack’s fantasy tales, replete with maps and fictional histories. In this world, elflike people with short life spans hold their people’s collective memories in a “Memory Tree.” There are also sorcerers, the Cree, whose magic comes at a cost: They can’t have kids. This narrative moves around in time, jumping between various locales and several different characters, including sorcerer/scholar Padgett and a mysterious figure named Benedictus. One story focuses on an aging commander who’s attempting to protect his backwater outpost from an unknown army; another tells of two unlikely detectives searching for a missing prince. The overall, interconnected structure is riveting, as the reader never knows where the story will go next—in either arc. The dual storylines effectively feed off of each other, and various details and character traits make their ways from Jack’s life into his fiction. Moreover, Lay manages to bring the two different strands together at the end in a satisfactory and unexpected way. By the end of the novel, the author impressively creates two vivid worlds, each with its own history and compelling characters, while also offering a meditation on the relationship between creativity, fertility, and shared memory.
A stunning fantasy debut.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-7321035-0-4
Page Count: 419
Publisher: Gowanus Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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