A bold beginning to a series that explores gender, empathy, and the frozen north.
Clark’s (The Midnight Land: Part Two: The Gift, 2015) fantasy novel, the first in a series, takes place in an alternate-history version of Russia where women rule and wood spirits lurk among the fir trees.
Krasnoslava “Slava” Tsarinovna is the younger half sister of the Tsarina, Empress of all Zem’. The throne has descended, through their mother’s line, from the very first Empress, Miroslava Praskovyevna, who seized power with “fire and steel. And blood, lots of blood and suffering.” Slava, unlike the capital’s ruthless, scheming princesses, is disgusted by her heritage, feeling “nothing but pleasure in being so totally unlike someone she would have liked to deny all connection to.” She’s gifted—or cursed—with the supernatural ability to feel the emotions of others when they’re nearby, and she can’t help but be overwhelmed by the ugliness she senses in almost everyone she encounters. To Slava, “people are wolves hiding in rotting lambskins,” and she longs to escape them. When a northern princess, Olga Vasilisovna, comes to the Tsarina proposing an expedition to the far north, beyond the edges of maps, Slava begs to go with her. The journey challenges and changes Slava, and she gains physical strength even as her psychic powers grow. The mercy she shows others comes back to their traveling party tenfold; for example, an elk she saves leads the expedition back to the road when they go astray. Eventually, the leshiye, forest spirits who take the forms of trees, take notice—but will they prove to be friends or foes? Clark’s narrative wears its Russian literature influences on its sleeve: the parsimonious Princess Primorskaya, for example, seems like she’s right out of a Nikolai Gogol tale. The author weaves together realistic episodes of life on the road (with its uncanny watchers just off the path) and skillfully evokes the epic scale of the taiga and tundra: “The great snowy plain stretched out before her all the way to the horizon, where a pale sun was rising.” But her choice to swap the usual gender roles—the matriarchal society controls the life of every character, be they man or woman, peasant or Tsarina—elevates this book beyond the average fantasy novel.
A bold beginning to a series that explores gender, empathy, and the frozen north.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5188-3949-8
Page Count: 534
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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