An engaging adventure novel filled with action, mystery and romance.
McFarland’s (Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918, 2001) novel chronicles the adventures of a sorcerer in the American Southwest during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
It’s not uncommon for picaresque novels to begin with the birth of their hero, as this first volume in McFarland’s Buenaventura series does. It’s far less common for the hero to be humming his favorite songs while he’s being born. Don Carlos Buenaventura manages it, however, because he’s actually an old and experienced brujo—a reincarnated sorcerer who embarks on his sixth life as part of an aristocratic family in 1670s Mexico City. As a teenager, he has a series of adventures along the Camino Real and in Santa Fe (now in New Mexico) in the wake of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. He gradually recovers memories of his past lives and recalls the dangers of his present life—his superhuman nature might be detected by humans, for example, or by members of the evil Moon Moiety, an order of brujos dedicated to the eradication of Don Carlos’ Sun Moiety and led by the evil Don Malvolio. In the course of McFarland’s crowded but expertly paced narrative, Don Carlos encounters card sharps, warrior Apaches, evil sorcerers and a beguiling swordswoman named Inez who teaches him, among many other things, the art of fencing. She speaks more accurately than she knows when she tells him that a “little mystery in a relationship can be a good thing.” Although Don Carlos may be entering his sixth life, McFarland engagingly portrays him as a naïve youth, innocent in the ways of his mysterious craft; he may be able to transform himself easily into a hawk or an owl, but the restraint and wisdom that his master Don Serafino preaches comes much harder to him. Like any good adventure hero, he’s instinctively both a lover and a fighter.
An engaging adventure novel filled with action, mystery and romance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0865349445
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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