While repetitive in places, this rousing adventure maintains a thrilling pace.
A debut fantasy novel focuses on an epic quest to stop an extraordinary foe.
The Cromwell brothers begin their story with a wizard gone bad named Dementhus. Dementhus has taken to the dark art of necromancy while also worshiping a figure named Terminus. In order to serve Terminus, Dementhus embarks on a quest to find a powerful Golem. Elsewhere in the world, a boy named Tryam is on the cusp of his 18th birthday. Tryam lives a strict, secure existence surrounded by monks at an abbey. While the monks are sworn to a life of nonviolence, Tryam longs for some action. As luck would have it, a tournament is announced in which the winner will be allowed to join the local knights. Tryam manages to practice swordsmanship and archery in secret, thanks to his two Berserker warrior friends, Wulfric and Kara. Meanwhile, another hopeful young man seeks instruction. Telvar is a wizard who shows up for an apprenticeship with the stern but knowledgeable Myramar. Tryam, Telvar, and the rest do not realize it yet but eventually they will have to unite if they are to stop Dementhus and his sinister plans. And so goes a tale that, while at the outset seems simple, incorporates a variety of twists and turns. If readers imagine Tryam will simply win the tournament, become a knight, and save the day with the help of some magic from Telvar, they are sorely mistaken. The plot winds up involving a great many more characters yet they remain distinct. Likewise, the story manages to stay lively as the settings change, spells are cast, and bloodshed seems always around the corner. But at times, the energetic tale succumbs to repetitiveness. For instance, if readers forget what happened at Tryam’s tournament, they need not worry: The events are repeated again as one character explains the outcome to another. Certain statements ring of obviousness, as when one player observes, as if no one else had ascertained as much: “There is powerful necromancy at work here!” Nevertheless, the story keeps moving to what is destined to be a violent finale. Even if readers are sometimes told too much, the tale’s elements expertly come together.
While repetitive in places, this rousing adventure maintains a thrilling pace.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71812-277-2
Page Count: 591
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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