With a relatable heroine facing challenges in a vivid world of magic and mystery, this tale remains an action-packed treat.
In this YA fantasy sequel, a teenage magic student who goes into hiding to avoid a murderous monarch must embark on a secret mission.
In Night’s (The Crowns of Croswald, 2017) first book in this suspense-filled series, orphan and former castle maid Ivy Lovely explored her magical birthright at a school for those with the ability to become scrivenists (spell-casters using quills), came into possession of a broken gemstone of great power, and confronted the terrifying Dark Queen. The repercussions of that encounter and Ivy’s desperate need to find the missing pieces of the Kindred Stone before the Dark Queen does fuel Book II with more chilling mysteries—shadows and shades that seem to have a will of their own and the ominous theft of a black quill, corrupted by its dead owner and locked away for safety—and more of the author’s fertile flights of fancy. Ivy is sent by a storm-propelled, flying “cabby” to the secret town of Belzebuthe, where the sky is lit by stars made of wishes. She warms her feet on her pet scaldron, a small, fire-breathing dragon; “hairies,” Croswald’s common light source, tiny beings whose hair lights up in response to human speech, appear; and Ivy bonds with a wild “invisitaur,” a giant creature that can be seen only when outlined by falling rain or snow. (Night again gives any Harry Potterish similarities her own twist: Quogo matches aren’t a Quidditch-like sport, but a plot-driving competition between resuscitated quills and the magical specialties of departed scrivenists.) The author’s inventiveness doesn’t eclipse her well-defined heroine. Ivy still has fears and insecurities rooted in her past (trepidations the Dark Queen tries to exploit), yet she has gained confidence, made friends, and realized her strength during a brutal incursion into Belzebuthe. That dire event and words that Ivy discovers in a forgotten book set the stage for Night’s third installment of the series.
With a relatable heroine facing challenges in a vivid world of magic and mystery, this tale remains an action-packed treat.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9969486-6-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Stories Untold Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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