A lavishly detailed, if slightly wooden, look at the mystical underside of a vanished Santa Fe world.
McFarland (The Brujo’s Way, 2013) offers his second volume of adventures of an 18th century New Mexico wizard.
In 1706, Don Carlos Buenaventura, a deliberative, noble figure, is currently in his sixth lifetime. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he follows “The Brujo’s Way,” a pure, heroic philosophical approach that clears his mind, allowing him to use his mystical powers, which include manipulating energy and transforming himself and others into various kinds of animals. Through the centuries, he’s opposed the machinations of a fellow super-being, Don Malvolio. In this latest novel, Don Carlos is aided by a woman named Inez, who also possesses rudimentary bruja powers, although of a different nature than his own. They, along with other allies, encounter a trio of newcomers to Santa Fe: a magician and two dancers. Don Carlos finds them intriguing, but he’s suspicious that they may be his enemy’s disciples. As in the previous volume, McFarland gives readers much more than a mere contest between good and evil sorcerers in the distant wake of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Along the way, he incorporates a great deal of Santa Fe history and culture, as well as plenty of Pueblo mysticism. In the tradition of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, characters often expound on life and philosophy; however, in that same tradition, it’s at the expense of natural-seeming dialogue or interactions. Don Carlos, in particular, comes across as disconnected from the exigencies of daily reality (other characters actually comment on it), which makes the book’s dramatic ending feel a bit jury-rigged. The story’s final act feels too much like a bridge to a potential third installment to deliver as much satisfaction as it otherwise might have. That said, the bulk of the book is every bit as fascinating and comprehensive as its predecessor.
A lavishly detailed, if slightly wooden, look at the mystical underside of a vanished Santa Fe world.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1632930088
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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