Unless the Serpent rises, this rouser is the windup.
Fourth fantasy-adventure chorus to the roguish and nimble Band of Four series.
As with Parsifal’s quest in the Grail legend, King Kelgrael Snowsar is asleep and, although he awakened in A Dragon’s Ascension (2002), it happens that the gigantic Sacred Great Fanged Serpent of the Shaping is bound into slumber by the King and he can keep the Serpent sleepbound only while sleepbound himself, and so the Serpent arose to confront the Dragon. But a spell has been cast over Aglirta, and only the Band of Four seem likely to attain the four magical Dwaerindim stones that can fully awaken the land. The four include huge, dumb-as-a-post warrior, sword-swinger and Overduke of Aglirta, Hawkril Anharu; small, agile, and clever procurer-scout-thief Crael “Longfingers” Delnbone, also Overduke of Aglirta; the late Sarasper “Wolf-spider” Codelmer, a shape-shifter who goes as a bat, a snake, or man-eating wolf-spider before becoming the Dragon and dying in the battle against the Serpent and being laid to rest as Lord Dragon; and Overduke of Aglirta and Baroness of Silvertree, Lady Embra, a beautiful sorceress in gem-studded gowns who now leads the Band of Four. We find that the Band has its own dangerous mysteries that threaten its mission. All turns on the priests (or wizards) of the now-slain Serpent, who believe a new Great Serpent must arise to lead them. Fear arises that Serpent-priests, now loosing werewolves, will bring about a battle that will break up all of Asmarand, if not the whole continent of Darsar. Will beautiful Embra become the Dragon, ready to keep down the new Serpent that may arise?
Unless the Serpent rises, this rouser is the windup.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30223-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.
Manic parodist Moore, fresh off a season in 1947 San Francisco (Noir, 2018), returns with a rare gift for Shakespeare fans who think A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be perfect if only it were a little more madcap.
Cast adrift by pirates together with his apprentice, halfwit giant Drool, and Jeff, his barely less intelligent monkey, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, jester to the late King Lear, washes ashore in Shakespeare’s Athens, where Cobweb, a squirrel by day and fairy by night, takes him under her wing and other parts. Soon after he encounters Robin Goodfellow (the Puck), jester to shadow king Oberon, and Nick Bottom and the other clueless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisby in a nearby forest before they present it in celebration of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the captive Amazon queen who’s captured his heart, Pocket (The Serpent of Venice, 2014, etc.) finds Robin fatally shot by an arrow. Suspected briefly of the murder himself, he’s commissioned, first by Hippolyta, then by the unwitting Theseus, to identify the Puck’s killer. Oh, and Egeus, the Duke’s steward, wants him to find and execute Lysander, who’s run off with Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, instead of marrying Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius. As English majors can attest, a remarkable amount of this madness can already be found in Shakespeare’s play. Moore’s contribution is to amp up the couplings, bawdy language, violence, and metatextual analogies between the royals, the fairies, the mechanicals, his own interloping hero, and any number of other plays by the Bard.
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.
If you don’t have a woeful countenance already, this knight’s tale will slap one on you right quick.
It’s 1483, and down in Cornwall, a knight is writing a farewell to his children against the possibility that he may fall in battle in a war against the Thane of Cawdor. Not the one whose title King Macbeth usurped 400 years earlier, it would seem—though, given the anachronistic nature of this book, anything’s possible. Take, for instance, a moment just a few pages in, when our seasoned and grown-up knight, settling into his yarn, recalls that the knight to whom he apprenticed as a young man began his tutelage with a nice cuppa. That’s all very well and good, except that tea was unknown in the Middle Ages; a stickler will tell you that it first turns up a century and a half after the events actor/novelist Hawke (Ash Wednesday, 2002, etc.) recounts. That’s either magical realism or sloppiness, both of which this latest effort abounds in. Take the nostrum that Good Sir Knight Senior imparts to Junior: “You are better than no one, and no one is better than you.” All very nicely egalitarian, that, but a bit out of step with the elaborate hierarchy of medieval equerry and nobility. And more: “The simple joys are the great ones. Pleasure is not complicated.” Tell it to Abelard and Heloise, oh Obi-Wan. Elsewhere Hawke merrily (and again anachronistically) stuffs in a well-known Buddhist tale, the punch line to which is, “I set that boy down hours ago, but I see you are still carrying him.” Ah, well. By all appearances, Hawke aspires to write a modern Siddhartha, but what we wind up with is more along the lines of watered-down Mitch Albom—and that’s a very weak cup of tea indeed.
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-96233-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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