In 1899 London, the scion of a banking family abandons his wastrel life for a lowly job with the firm that draws him deep into supernatural oddities.
Busy, busy, busy. First there’s Liss, who's known for his historical mysteries but who has also written middle-grade science fiction and Marvel stories—14 full-length novels since 2000, plus short fiction and comic books. Then there’s his latest, a historical fantasy that combines the worlds of high finance and occultism, specifically the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and aberrations such as lycanthropes, ghostly slashers called Elegants, and women giving birth to rabbits. The hero is Thomas Thresher, age 23, who has been doing little beyond gambling and whoring when he’s forced to take a junior clerk’s post with the family bank and get engaged to the daughter of a Jewish businessman (Liss expends an unpleasant amount of ink reflecting period-appropriate antisemitism). With the proposed nuptials and the bank’s problems in mind, Thomas stumbles on puzzling purchases of debts and London buildings. His investigations lead him to a Golden Dawn gathering, which includes William Butler Yeats, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He also meets Aleister Crowley, who becomes an ally, as well as a woman who has turned wolflike, while Thomas himself has green leaves growing on him. Many such Peculiars have appeared in London recently, along with a thick fog that has nasty tendrils, all of it tied perhaps to real estate and mystical portals. There are signs of haste in the writing, and Thomas’ frequent bouts of self-doubt slow the pace, but Liss tells his story well, with some nice Dickensian surprises. What’s most fun is when he snaps off a comic line that plays on the absurdities involved: “Yes, he is becoming a plant, but he comes from an excellent family.”
A colorful read with some rough edges but entertaining throughout.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61696-358-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FANTASY | HISTORICAL FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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