A middling Middle Earth–ian yarn, then, that seems destined to be the next big thing among the Game of Thrones set.
Chick lit meets swords and sorcery in the perfect commodity for a hot demographic.
But is it art? Debut novelist Johansen turns in a fantasy novel that’s derivative of Tolkien, as so many books in the genre are—it’s got its merry band of warriors, its struggle for a throne that has a long and tangled history, its battle for good and evil. That this novel just happens to have commanded a huge advance and a movie deal, with Emma Watson attached at this writing to play the heroine, Kelsea, is incidental to the tale, which, schematized, would be pretty by-the-numbers. As a worldbuilding exercise, it has many deficiencies: While the story is set in the not-too-distant future, its trappings are medieval and not, as in A Canticle for Leibowitz, because of an intervening apocalypse; it’s a churchy and mystical sort of place, but the heroine has a command of Mendelian genetics (“Red hair was a recessive gene, and in the three centuries since the Crossing, it had bred slowly and steadily out of the population”). But, continuity errors and improbabilities aside—when hiding from a deadly enemy, for instance, a troop of royal guards isn’t really likely to get drunk, sing loud songs and keep the orcs awake all night—Johansen adds value to the tale with well-crafted sentences that sometimes build into exuberant paragraphs: “The queenship she’d inherited, problematic enough in the abstract, now appeared insurmountable. But of course, she had already known the road would be difficult. Carlin had told her so obliquely, through years spent studying the troubled nations and kingdoms of the past.” On the plus side, too, is Johansen’s wise choice to make the heroine a plain-ish Jane who learns on the go, discovering her inner resources as she emerges from adolescence into adulthood. And applause, too, for some nicely gory closing moments.
A middling Middle Earth–ian yarn, then, that seems destined to be the next big thing among the Game of Thrones set.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229036-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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