An epic fantasy tale set in an ornately crafted universe.
Geller tells the story of a boy whose otherworldly powers may liberate his nation in this debut novel.
Arol is a 16-year-old assistant at the Sacred Temple of Gennebar, where his people, the Gennebri, make offerings to their goddess, Gennesset, the Mother of the Universe. The earthquake-prone country of Gennebar is under occupation by the Drenarian Empire, which taxes and enslaves the local populace while propping up a Gennebri High Priestess of its own selection. Arol recently experienced a strange blip in time, when he was able to escape a lion because reality itself seemed to slow down around him. “It was moving so slowly I’m sure I could have reached out and plucked a feather from its wing,” he recalls of a nearby bird. “Yet it was flying—flying almost in place as if the air had frozen solid like ice and trapped it there!” With the help of his friend Zorn, Arol discovers from an ancient manuscript that time is composed of threads that can be manipulated by those who possess a rare mystical gift. Arol may be one of these hypothetical Weavers and, with the proper training, could learn to harness the power to change time and space. This information sets Arol on a path that will not only have great ramifications for his own life, but for the future—and freedom—of all of Gennebar as well. The sociopolitical dynamics of Gennebar bear more than a passing resemblance to first-century Palestine (Geller even winkingly borrows the place name Golgotha at one point), but the novel so successfully summons the pleasures of the sword-and-sorcery genre that the reader isn’t thinking of Jesus the Nazarene so much as Conan the Cimmerian. The rise of Arol from servant to savior is hardly new, but the vibrancy of Geller’s universe (finely detailed over the course of the tome’s nearly 1,000 pages) makes up for the inevitably familiar arc of the protagonist. Fans of fantasy should enjoy the thoughtfulness with which Geller approaches the genre while maintaining a tightly paced plot from beginning to end.
An epic fantasy tale set in an ornately crafted universe.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 963
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At Buckkeep in the Six Duchies, young Fitz, the bastard son of Prince Chivalry, is raised as a stablehand by old warrior Burrich. But when Chivalry dies without legitimate issue—murdered, it's rumored—Fitz, at the orders of King Shrewd, is brought into the palace and trained in the knightly and courtly arts. Meanwhile, secretly at night, he receives instruction from another bastard, Chade, in the assassin's craft. Now, King Shrewd's subjects are imperiled by the visits of the Red-Ship Raiders—formidable warriors who pillage the seacoasts and turn their human victims into vicious, destructive zombies. Since rehabilitating the zombies proves impossible, it's Fitz's task to go abroad covertly and kill them as quickly and humanely as possible. Shrewd orders that Fitz be taught the Skill—mental powers of telepathy and coercion possessed by all those of the royal line; his teacher is Galen, a sadistic ally of the popinjay Prince Regal, who hates Fitz all the more for his loyalty to Shrewd's other son, the stalwart soldier Verity. Galen brutalizes Fitz and, unknown to anyone, implants a mental block that prevents Fitz from using the Skill. Later, Shrewd decrees that, to cement an alliance, Verity shall wed the Princess Kettricken, heir to a remote yet rich mountain kingdom. Verity, occupied with Skillfully keeping the Red-Ship Raiders at bay, can't go to collect his bride, so Regal and Fitz are sent. Finally, Fitz must discover the depths of Regal's perfidy, recapture his true Skill, win Kettricken's heart for Verity, and help Verity defeat the Raiders. An intriguing, controlled, and remarkably assured debut, at once satisfyingly self-contained yet leaving plenty of scope for future extensions and embellishments.
Pub Date: April 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-37445-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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