An excellent tale that serves as both a thriller and anthropological portrait.
In this debut ancient Mayan adventure, the son of escaped slaves chooses nonviolence while his father prepares to exact vengeance on his former masters.
Seventeen-year-old Ixmal, of the highland jungle Ppentaca people, visits an altar dedicated to Chac, god of rain. As his father and village chief, Totec, prepares to march an army into the Feathered Kingdom, Ixmal senses disaster ahead. Totec, once a slave in the Feathered Kingdom, listens to the guidance of Hunapu, the village prayer-maker, that now is the time for retribution. To ensure victory, the warriors will sacrifice a child, to which Ixmal says, “If you allow this slaughter, the cause is doomed.” Disgusted with his son, Totec marches without him across the No Name River and into Kuma lands. Initially, the force of 500 men encounters abandoned villages. Only when the Ppentaca begin burning a path toward the Feathered Kingdom’s capital of Ocochac do opposing warriors attack. Totec and his army are destroyed. Shanti, Ixmal’s mother, allows the teenager to leave the village to settle his father’s spirit. He follows Totec’s trail, arriving in the village of a woodcarver named Pich and his daughter, Sahache. After seeing Sahache perform a dance celebrating her passage into womanhood, Ixmal grows enamored and decides to settle with Pich as a farmer, all the while learning what he can of his father’s fate. Bolton offers a quiet thriller that will educate readers about ancient Mayan culture and myth. He places a glossary before the novel featuring terms like “yollotl” (heart, soul), though it’s fun to decode the Mayan vocabulary sprinkled throughout the narrative. Iku, a Kumanian who dreams of an invasion, is an intriguing villain who rises to prominence opposite Ixmal. The author roundly presents the inner lives of his cast, as when Pich wonders: “What quarrel” do the invaders “have with the Feathered Kingdom? That no elder had asked these questions troubled him.” Perhaps most affecting is that these characters’ lives revolve around a harsh environment that, during stretches of drought, threatens society and any progress the enlightened king, Quetzal the Young, might hope for.
An excellent tale that serves as both a thriller and anthropological portrait.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-154-3
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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