Full of the usual jolly banter that passes for wit, creamy smooth and blandly unsurprising.
Stand-alone fantasy, already a bestseller in the UK, from the vastly popular husband-and-wife team (The Rivan Codex, 1998, etc.). Lovable rogue Althalus suffers an inexplicable run of bad luck. Just then, he’s approached by the tough-looking Ghend to steal a Book from the House at the End of the World. Althalus doesn’t know what a book is, so Ghend shows him his—a large tome residing in a big black box. After various adventures, Althalus reaches his destination, and grabs the Book—it’s huge and in a white box—but the room suddenly has no door. Althalus finds himself alone with a talking cat, Em, who’s actually the goddess Dweia. Her brother Deiwos, who built the house, creates things and then just wanders off Her other brother, Daeva, wants to devolve things back to the primordial chaos, or something; Ghend is his chief servant. Tutored by Em, Althalus learns how to read the Book, and to use the magic powers conveyed by the words in the Book. The house, he also discovers, is riddled with doorways through space and time. Finally, 2500 years later, Althalus and Em leave to gather a team to help fight Ghend and his black-Book gang. Let battle commence.
Full of the usual jolly banter that passes for wit, creamy smooth and blandly unsurprising.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-44077-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are...
From one of the great masters of modern speculative fiction: Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys (2005).
An unnamed protagonist and narrator returns to his Sussex roots to attend a funeral. Although his boyhood dwelling no longer stands, at the end of the road lies the Hempstock farm, to which he’s drawn without knowing why. Memories begin to flow. The Hempstocks were an odd family, with 11-year-old Lettie’s claim that their duck pond was an ocean, her mother’s miraculous cooking and her grandmother’s reminiscences of the Big Bang; all three seemed much older than their apparent ages. Forty years ago, the family lodger, a South African opal miner, gambled his fortune away, then committed suicide in the Hempstock farmyard. Something dark, deadly and far distant heard his dying lament and swooped closer. As the past becomes the present, Lettie takes the boy’s hand and confidently sets off through unearthly landscapes to deal with the menace; but he’s only 7 years old, and he makes a mistake. Instead of banishing the predator, he brings it back into the familiar world, where it reappears as his family’s new housekeeper, the demonic Ursula Monkton. Terrified, he tries to flee back to the Hempstocks, but Ursula easily keeps him confined as she cruelly manipulates and torments his parents and sister. Despite his determination and well-developed sense of right and wrong, he’s also a scared little boy drawn into adventures beyond his understanding, forced into terrible mistakes through innocence. Yet, guided by a female wisdom beyond his ability to comprehend, he may one day find redemption.
Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are shaped by childhood experiences, what we gain from them and the price we pay.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-225565-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
PROFILES
Solid and absorbing but not the tour de force the Powder Mage trilogy was.
Conclusion to McClellan’s Gods of Blood and Powder fantasy trilogy (Wrath of Empire, 2018, etc.), in which politicking assumes as much importance as magic and armies.
Dynize blood sorcerer Ka-Sedial intends to secure the three ancient monoliths known as godstones in order to make himself into a god, and he invades Fatrasta to capture two of them. Giant warrior Ben Styke, accompanied by Ka-Poel, the mute bone-eye sorcerer (and Ka-Sedial's grandaughter) whose magic can detect the stones, plans to attack Dynize and locate the third godstone. But a storm scatters Styke and Ka-Poel's ships and strands them with only 20 lancers. Worse, the stone is already under Ka-Sedial's control, forcing them to forgo brute force and attempt diplomacy. Ka-Poel's husband, Taniel, despite his near godlike powers, spends most of the book trying to catch up with them. Gen. Vlora Flint, grievously wounded and bereft of her gunpowder magic, burns for revenge yet must engage more Dynize armies and endure political interference. Ex-spy Michel Bravis and Ka-Poel's sister Ichtracia, a Privileged sorcerer, try to learn why so many Palo are mysteriously disappearing. McClellan tells an intriguing tale. Still, alert readers will wonder why the book's villain, having quickly solved his main problem, then does nothing for hundreds of pages and why many of the characters that add salt and spice to the proceedings spend too long offstage or just form wallpaper. True, the author doesn't do politics nearly as effectively as he does magic and battles, and he wrings out few surprising plot twists. His prior novels, with their hero Field Marshal Tamas, cast an unfortunately deep shadow: Tamas is one of the great fantasy heroes of recent years, and nobody here comes close.
Solid and absorbing but not the tour de force the Powder Mage trilogy was.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-40731-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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