While treading familiar terrain, this tale about a league of warriors remains unquestionably appealing, rousing, and worthy...
Dwarves band together with humans and elves to stop an evil sorcerer involved in massacring kingdoms and stealing souls in this fantasy.
Bran, like most dwarves, doesn’t think highly of humans. Seeing many in the human town, Kopa, Bran and her Uncle Daga consider them weak. Children, for one, don’t reach maturity until age 20, whereas Bran, a mere 7, is on the cusp of adulthood. So it’s a surprise when Bran, while learning to forge horseshoes, bonds with the human farrier’s 14-year-old son, Vilmar. Their friendship grows as Vilmar teaches Bran to ride horses, but destiny soon pulls them apart. With war on the horizon, Bran joins the Yazu, a secret society of warriors trained to protect dwarves. Vilmar, gifted with magic from a unicorn he once helped, has the capacity to become a powerful green wizard who can access the five elements for attack or defense. Meanwhile, enchanter Savas-Zev, sporting an inexplicable contempt for dwarves, is killing all races and infecting dwarves in particular with a fatal pox. Bran, Vilmar, and others lose loved ones at the hands of the murderous Savas-Zev, but it gets worse: the wizard locks restless souls in hundreds of crystal balls called soul cages. A potentially lethal confrontation between the Yazu and Savas-Zev seems inevitable. Recognizable mystical creatures populate the novel, from elves, including Yazu ally Iyorath, to villainous orcs, goblins, and trolls. McLaughlin (Whispers of Life, 2014, etc.) adds refreshing touches, like the Dahla horse Daga gives his niece—a small wooden steed that can manifest into whatever real one Bran imagines. Descriptive passages augment the story, especially Vilmar training with the elements, buried in the earth or enveloped by fire. Plus there’s a character whose eventual appearance is not just unsettling but likewise sets the stage for a sequel. The narrative only falters with notable inconsistencies, primarily surrounding the Yazu. For example, although the Yazu’s a group of “dwarf women warriors,” it’s clear that there are both male, like Captain Garn-Ithel, and non-dwarf members. Similarly, an implication that men will die by simply uttering “Yazu” proves untrue when numerous males repeatedly say it.
While treading familiar terrain, this tale about a league of warriors remains unquestionably appealing, rousing, and worthy of a sequel.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942430-47-6
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Year of the Book Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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