Fans of fantasy and the paranormal will often enjoy this series debut despite its reliance on clichés.
In this first Arcane Court novel, Fox (Contessa: Princess of Summer Fae, 2014, etc.) tells the story of a dragon who tries to protect his secret from humans as he battles demons terrorizing New Orleans with his supernatural crew.
Cimmerian is a centuries-old dragon who can “shift” into human form. After a brutal confrontation with the psychotic demon Nitha, he took an “extended vacation” from his job protecting New Orleans from the forces of evil, and he just wants to relax. Then Nitha returns to the city with a diabolical plan to take over the Arcane Court, the judicial system that employs Cim and keeps the peace between the demons and the rest of the supernatural realm. Cim must team up with his lifelong friend, the half-demon, half-dragon Wretch (short for “Wretched Spawn”), and Nitha’s demon sister, Laythe, to kill Nitha and her insane demon husband before they come to power. At the same time, Cim and his team investigate a disturbing series of murders that have been leaving victims dismembered in the streets. With a practiced hand, Fox balances fantasy folklore with modernity, as when the Arcane Court sends kill orders via email, and she’s also a master of suspense. However, she has trouble balancing the present-day action and the characters’ past histories, resulting in an intricate plot that confuses more than it entertains. She also relies on stale, outdated gender stereotypes in her descriptions of female characters: coroner Angie’s “ample curves [fill] out her lab coat,” for example, and during Mardi Gras, “females approached [Cim] and offered all kinds of sexual favors.” Such moments are unnecessary to further the exciting story, which employs a charming cast of secondary characters, such as bartender Grace, who can shift into a jaguar, and New Orleans’ alpha werewolf, Adam. That said, the manuscript’s many punctuation errors (“ ‘Demons don’t wear panties.’ We said simultaneously”) make it seem amateurish at times.
Fans of fantasy and the paranormal will often enjoy this series debut despite its reliance on clichés.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9899610-1-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graylin Rane
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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