An engaging collection that takes on the love and loneliness lurking in the bright lights and shadowed corners of the...
Debut author Stalcup’s short story collection takes a look at what is gained and, more often, lost through the not-so-simple act of living.
Stalcup’s stories introduce us to a variety of characters, many of whom we get to know through their frequently unusual professions. We meet an exotic dancer who performs sexual favors for certain clients, a woman who wails professionally at funerals, and a man who helps people write more effective suicide notes. The estrangement these characters feel from their own lives is heightened by the bizarre situations that develop around them—things are rarely what they seem to be. This is not to say, however, that Stalcup relies on the strange or uncanny to explore human loneliness. The most engaging and emotionally powerful story in the collection, “All Those Stairs,” covers two—on the surface uneventful—days in the life of a subway station elevator operator. There are other themes also woven through the collection—how the objects that populate our lives can define us, for example, or the made and missed connections between strangers in big cities. The latter of these is explored most obviously and somewhat ham-handedly in “Brightest Corners,” which takes the form of “missed connections” posted on Craigslist. There are a few other stories that feel as though they miss their emotional marks as well; the pedantic tendencies of the narrator in “In the Heart of the Empire” become the pedantic tendencies of the story itself, which lags. On the whole, though, the world of each story and the lyrical quality of the writing itself are more compelling than the collection’s few shortcomings.
An engaging collection that takes on the love and loneliness lurking in the bright lights and shadowed corners of the everyday.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-02203-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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