This propulsive, gripping sequel focuses on a hero’s quest to find personal justice.
This second installment of an epic fantasy follows a young man through war and intrigue.
In When Darkness Descends (2020), the first volume in Lücke’s series, Tom Anderson of Earth used the mystical “eyes of lost souls” to travel to Enthilen in the world of Ostamp in search of his grandmother’s murderer. Predictably, he immediately plunged into a series of escapades in Enthilen and beyond, gathering a small group of friends and allies (including the valiant warrior Athalee “Thaly” of Bagendon, the trollish stone-grell Grin, and the impish “mouldewerp” Dwarrow) and amassing a rogues’ gallery of enemies, including Enthilen’s banished former king, Malphas. Book 1 ended on an old-fashioned cliffhanger. Tom’s friends rescued him in the nick of time from human sacrifice, and the whole band leapt off a cliff to the improbable safety of the dark waters below. This second volume picks up right where the previous one left off, but the author very smoothly prefaces the main narrative with a fairly involving synopsis in the unlikely event that readers are starting the series here. Certainly, Lücke doesn’t pause any longer than this for readers new or old. The story takes off like a shot and keeps churning, with Tom being instantly separated from his friends at sea. He lands desperate and alone in a remote Enthilen fishing village, with Thaly and Grin believing him drowned. The tale that unfolds is full of adventures and political intrigue, with more typical fantasy elements deliberately downplayed (“People spend way too much time bewitched by the promise of divine enchantment and not enough time in wonder of the real magic all around them,” one characters says, in a comment that might also serve as a mild rebuke to fantasy fans). Lücke does a skillful job of bringing the intricate politics of his broader plot into sharp, personal focus, mainly through well-drawn secondary characters like Thaly’s mother, Emelin. The riveting story is a sure-fire treat for Game of Thrones fans.
This propulsive, gripping sequel focuses on a hero’s quest to find personal justice.Pub Date: July 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-64-882072-7
Page Count: 594
Publisher: With Distinction Consultants
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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