A novel that could have had quite a tale to tell, but its flaws keep it from taking flight.
Debut novelist Heng tells a YA tale of personal struggle and political revolution in the fantastic world of Bumi.
A teenage girl named Arla is pushed out of the orphanage where she lives and into danger and adventure in the streets of a city named Paradise. She quickly finds herself pursued by members of a political faction called the Forlorn who run the city government, which has fostered greed and consumerism in the society. She later becomes embroiled in a growing revolutionary effort by the Hibiscus Party, whose members live mostly underground in a forgotten part of Paradise called Kampung. The Hibiscus Party is named after a legendary airship, which most people believe is only a legend from an outlawed children’s book. Arla meets new people and suffers losses, she learns that much of what she was taught in the orphanage is false, and some questions remain unanswered: who really ended the Great War that put the Forlorn in power? Is the Hibiscus Airship real? And are there other worlds beyond Bumi? As the Hibiscus Party prepares to launch a bloodless revolution, Arla learns difficult lessons about abandonment, betrayal, and freedom. The novel has a very promising premise, and many characters are given deep, personal struggles to overcome. However, the prose isn’t up to the task of conveying the grand story that the author wants to tell. Overly flowery passages regularly appear, along with contradictory or confusing descriptions (a man “silently bawled”; an airship flies “with the strength of a thousand men”) that will pull readers out of the story. The worldbuilding is inconsistent, as well; the existence of airships, for example, evokes a lower-tech world, but at one point, Arla mentions running a social media propaganda campaign despite the fact that there’s no other mention of social media in the book. Characters also sometimes seem to act illogically, seemingly only for the sake of adding a twist to the plot.
A novel that could have had quite a tale to tell, but its flaws keep it from taking flight.Pub Date: April 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5437-4056-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: PartridgeSingapore
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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