This hopeful adult fairy story focusing on two siblings glows with emotional complexity.
A fantasy debut sees a royal family battle a curse and a princess train to save her younger sister.
In the kingdom of Stonedragon, Fairy Queen Sinead is giving birth. She’s in the rose garden during a rainstorm with her fairy midwife, Maureen. Instead of going inside, the queen says, “My daughter is not some insipid princess to be petted….She is a fey creature.” But Sinead hardly meets her daughter—the queen dies immediately after the birth. Sinead’s mother, the fey Sorcha, insists that the child, named Rowan, is poisonous. In the ensuing years, King Balder takes a new wife, Gwyneth, and Princess Rowan grows into an androgynous little spitfire, better suited to tumbling in mud than wearing gowns. Gwyneth eventually gives birth to Roisin, who is displayed for visitors at the age of 6 months. Sorcha isn’t invited but arrives anyway. She places a curse on the infant, threatening that when Roisin turns 16, Rowan will break her sister’s heart and poison her with a finger pricked on a spindle. To fight the curse, three of Sinead’s fey aunts—Alma, Bride, and Cianna—offer to hide Roisin in anonymity until she turns 16. In this intricate twist on the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale, Caryn takes the motif of stolen innocence and runs with it through some dark emotional thickets. Rowan spends her teenage years forging herself into a knight despite the mockery of her father’s men and his own disapproval. Single-minded in the tasks of killing Sorcha and saving Roisin, the princess remains joyless until she begins exchanging letters with Prince Gavin of nearby Turrlough. Though they’ve never met, love blossoms when she realizes that “the days that pass between our correspondences are somehow less real, less important.” The curse, however, is a complex one; it frays the bonds among everyone else who cares for Roisin and constantly makes Rowan question her self-worth. And though Caryn’s debut features magic and swordsmanship, casual fantasy readers may be blindsided by the narrative’s maturity. The last page is nothing anybody might expect and a far cry from “The End.”
This hopeful adult fairy story focusing on two siblings glows with emotional complexity.Pub Date: July 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5334-6425-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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