As they beg our sympathy for their white-knuckled grief, these heroines speak a rhetoric that itself must have been bounced...
As with the bloody Black Blade (1999), Lustbader again abandons his Ninja action tales to return to the fantasy and foam of his earlier Sunset Warrior cycles. Will loyal fans find this moonglow too greatly at odds with his somersaulting thrillers and perhaps not cross over?
Things open with an overstuffed prologue, adrift in orientalia (“It was Lonon, the Fifth Season—that eerie time between High Summer and Autumn when the gimnopedes swarmed; when, on clear nights, all five moons, pale green as a dove’s belly, could be seen in the vast black bowl of night”). Readers lacking photographic memory will tremble at the elaborate background Lustbader sets up even before the story begins, a vast scheme ringing echoes on a half dozen other far-world phantasmagorias galloping toward Tor to be born. So it is that Giyan and Bartta, female twins, are born and, rather than having them killed, their mother ships them off to be raised as Ramahan at the Abbey of Floating White. By age 15, the twins, devoted to phytochemistry and the Goddess Miina, are versed in the religious politics of their day: their people, the Kundalan, now in bondage to the V’ornn, will be released only when Dar Sala-at returns to fulfill the prophecy made in The Five Sacred Books of Miina, finds The Pearl and defeats the V’ornn (a mission mirroring the messianic salvation brought by Paul Atreides in Dune). Who is the Dar Sala-at? None other than Riane, a girl V’ornn (raised as the enemy, for better or worse), whose burgeoning sorcerer’s energy will bring lightning to the sky, presaging the appearance of Miina’s Sacred Five Dragons.
As they beg our sympathy for their white-knuckled grief, these heroines speak a rhetoric that itself must have been bounced off the five moons. Still, this midnight dish will leave many disembodied with rapture.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87235-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.
Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.
The world’s not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call it Romeo and Juliet for the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text, The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, “She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it.” Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as “the man in the grey suit”? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise of teenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia’s magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53463-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and...
The debut novel from Australian actor Arnold is a fusion of paranormal fantasy and mystery set in a world where magic has been effectively destroyed by humans, forcing the supernatural population to live a radically diminished existence.
Fetch Phillips is a “Man for Hire,” which is another way of saying the down-on-his-luck, hard-drinking former Soldier–turned-detective will do just about anything to pay the bills. When a principal from a cross-species school enlists him to find a missing professor—a 300-year-old Vampire named Edmund Rye—Phillips quickly agrees. Without magic, the Vampires—and all other supernatural beings—are slowly dying. So how difficult could it be to find a withered bloodsucker who is so weak he can hardly move around? After visiting Rye’s last residence—a secluded loft space in the local library filled with the Vampire’s research and writings—Phillips discovers that one of Rye’s students is missing as well: a young Siren named January. His investigation becomes complicated when more Vampires turn up dead and he is almost killed himself. While the mystery element of the storyline is a bit thin, the focus on meticulous worldbuilding and highly detailed backstory as well as the cast of fully developed and memorable characters (Simms, the reptilian cop; Peteris, the disfigured half-werewolf; etc.) are unarguable strengths. But the real power here is in Arnold’s use of imagery throughout. His unconventional descriptive style brings a richness and depth to the narrative. Pete’s smile is “like a handbag with a broken zipper,” and the sound of Phillips’ falling from a building is “like someone stepping on an egg full of snails.”
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and Dashiell Hammett.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45582-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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