An overcrowded but mostly compelling tale of a 16th-century Floridian princess.
A Native princess in Florida fulfills her destiny in debut author Daniels’ first graphic novel in a series.
Teenage Uleyli spends her time crafting items, such as a spider medallion that she’s able to trade to a traveling peddler. However, her parents wish that she, as their eldest daughter, would concentrate more on fulfilling her duties as princess of the village. When Uleyli is 15, Mocoso, the chief of another, nearby village—to which her father is forced to pay tribute—demands that the girl be given to him as a wife. Uleyli’s father agrees to this, but negotiates that the wedding not occur for a year. The princess, distraught, seeks advice from the village medicine woman, who likens her to a fly caught in a spider’s web: “The more you struggle against it, the more stuck you will become. But if you stop struggling and center yourself you will see that you are not the fly but are the spider sitting in the center.” Uleyli refuses to accept this notion; instead, she formulates a plan that revolves around a Spanish prisoner, Juan Ortiz, who was recently brought to the village. Her father wants to execute the young man as revenge for a Spanish raid that killed Uleyli’s grandmother, but the princess convinces him to spare Juan’s life. If she can help Juan escape captivity, she thinks, then maybe he’ll take her with him. Daniels tells his story in simple, easy-to-follow language, and the full-color illustrations by debut artist Mitra are lively and engaging. The story is based on a legendary real-life encounter between a Native woman and a Spanish sailor, which is why the book claims, somewhat reductively, to be about “Florida’s Pocahontas.” The main flaw of the book, however, is its brevity: Daniels stuffs a fairly complex, multievent plot into just 30 pages. Uleyli’s goals, and the threats to her village, change a number of times throughout the story, and, as a result, the conclusion doesn’t feel fully satisfying. Further graphic novels in the series are planned.
An overcrowded but mostly compelling tale of a 16th-century Floridian princess.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9774189-4-7
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Rebourne Communications
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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