A gothic love triangle with two equally matched heroines. This isn’t kid’s stuff.
Two princesses (one earthbound, one aquatic) vie for the heart of a prince in this new twist on the classic fairy tale.
For 18-year-old mermaid princess Lenia, the world of men could not be a more exotic or fascinating place. Although her experience with humans is limited to the shipwrecks and dead sailors she comes across in her ocean-floor kingdom, she yearns for more. She gets her wish when she is finally permitted to go up and explore the surface, and has to save a young man from drowning during a storm. She delivers him to the shores of a convent and into the arms of a young novice. That girl, Margrethe, is actually the daughter of the northern king, hiding at the convent for her own protection. And, as luck would have it, the rescued sailor, Christopher, is the son of her father’s arch nemesis, the southern king. The two royals share an attraction, without knowing each other’s identity, and Christopher leaves without knowing Margrethe’s secret. Back with her merpeople family, a smitten Lenia pines for the prince and strives to find a way to be with him. Her quest takes her to the sea witch, Sybil, who informs her that becoming human is indeed possible, but comes with a steep price. Lenia has to give up her beautiful voice, and her lovely new legs will cause her chronic pain, like walking on knives. Also, Christopher must marry her if she is to survive and acquire a human soul. No matter. Lenia takes Sybil’s potion and goes to her beloved, who is indeed charmed by the mute otherworldly creature Lenia has transformed into. They become lovers, but she has competition. In order to stave off an almost inevitable war, Margrethe hatches a plan to marry Christopher herself, and unite their kingdoms. But while that might be good politics, it does not bode well for Lenia, who is unable to explain her situation to anyone. Faithful for the most part to Andersen’s dark fable, Turgeon’s (Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story, 2009) version wisely gives voice to the mermaid’s rival, making the prince’s ultimate choice—and Lenia’s sacrifice—even more poignant.
A gothic love triangle with two equally matched heroines. This isn’t kid’s stuff.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-58997-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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