A slow-paced fantasy series installment that lacks a truly climactic showdown.
The third volume in Bowen’s (Servants and Followers, 2014, etc.) epic-fantasy Legends of Arria series.
This latest installment continues the saga of the new Knights of Arria and the citizens of the town of Coe Baba. As the book opens, the residents are recovering from a violent clash with the evil Doomba and his followers. As the people blame one another for the destruction, a small group realizes they have something in common: They all have different kinds of magical powers. They form an unlikely, somewhat fractious alliance to protect their community from the forces of the evil Doomba. Meanwhile, Basha and Oaka (with their friends Monika and Gnat) continue on their own quest for Tau’s Cup, but now that they know they are also the fabled Knights of Arria, they must learn how to properly wield their swords and magic. The group faces trying times as they struggle to use their powers while also dealing with Doomba and his followers’ threats to their survival and freedom. The book’s conclusion sets the stage for at least one more book in the series. Readers of the previous books will welcome this installment’s familiar characters and notice a few new ones, including the bard Jobe, who joins the Knights; they may also be interested in how magic plays a more prominent role. As in past installments, the points of view and settings jump around, and the story progresses slowly, in part, because of these shifts. The book also often presents characters’ thoughts in a clunky fashion: “Monika was not certain if she could truly love [Basha], especially when he was so attached to Jawen and had started out on this quest, after all, to retrieve Tau’s Cup for Jawen so that they could get married.” The author uses ellipses repeatedly to create tension (“She couldn’t risk everything, not even for…”; “I just want to…”), which further slows the pace. As a result, readers eager to learn the fates of Basha and Oaka may become frustrated.
A slow-paced fantasy series installment that lacks a truly climactic showdown.Pub Date: July 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500425333
Page Count: 488
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.
A Texas family that runs a haunted house is haunted by monsters for decades.
This ambitious, grotesque debut novel is a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, so it may not be the easiest horror novel to parse or explain. That said, this is a very scary coming-of-age tale that lives in the same space as Stranger Things, Stand By Me, and Stephen King’s It (1986). The story is told by Noah Turner, who matter-of-factly recounts the dark and terrible fortunes of his family. He opens with the sweet romance between his parents, Harry and Margaret, who marry and start a comic book store and a haunted house called The Wandering Dark in the small town of Vandergriff, Texas. But terrible things keep happening, including Harry’s untimely death, Margaret’s bottomless grief, the sudden disappearance of Noah’s oldest sister, Sydney, and his sister Eunice’s crippling mental illness, not to mention the increasingly frequent disappearances of children from Vandergriff. These events would be frightening by themselves, but Hamill adds another layer by introducing a huge supernatural creature that turns up on Noah’s doorstep one night and declares it's his friend while giving him a few magical powers to boot. But things like giant monsters always turn out to be something...else, and in Noah’s adolescence, this one does, too. The way Hamill weaves his way between the phantasmagorical elements and Noah’s everyday dramas is nimble in a way reminiscent of King, who practically invented this narrative style. Creepy interstitial entries dubbed “The Turner Sequences” flesh out the fates of Noah’s family. Eventually, an older Noah meets a group of people calling themselves The Fellowship who can also see these monsters, and Noah’s instinct is to run as far away as possible. But darkness unleashed can never really be escaped, and readers are bound to find themselves shuddering at the novel's lurid denouement.
An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4767-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
First of a new fantasy series entitled The Liveship Traders, set on the same world as Hobb's stunning trilogy (concluded with Assassin's Quest, 1997) but otherwise unconnected. The trading ship Vivacia, owned and captained by Ephron Vestrit out of Bingtown, is constructed of wizardwood: Once three generations of Vestrits have died aboard, the wizardwood will ``quicken,'' become sentient and self-aware, embodied in its moving, talking figurehead. Two previous Vestrits have passed on; now Ephron lies dying, having turned over the captaincy to his arrogant and inexperience son-in-law Kyle Haven and not to his natural successor, sea-wise daughter Althea. Kyle in turn sends for his son Wintrow, whom he gave to be a priest of Sa and who wants only to remain at his monastery. Ephron dies, Vivacia quickens, and she befriends Wintrow. Kyle banishes Althea, sets about brutally training the reluctant Wintrow, and arranges to carry slaves. Meanwhile, the pirate captain Kennit nurses ambitions of capturing a liveship; some intelligent sea serpents have their own agenda; Ephron's widow Ronica must repay a crippling debt to the Rain Wild magicians, endangering her other daughter, the headstrong Malta; and Althea schemes to recover her ship. Plenty of promising ideas and material, but heavily padded and with utterly inconclusive plotlines: Hobb has succumbed to Doorstopper Syndrome, an apparently incurable malady characterized by bloat, irresolution, logorrhea, and brake failure.
Pub Date: March 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10324-5
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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