The lively final volume of a charming series.
Stevens’ middle-grade fantasy-trilogy conclusion sees his titular hero revisiting loved ones and battling his sorceress nemesis.
Thirteen-year-old Dirk lives with his family on a farm in Britannia, which is under Roman control. Last year, he escaped a curse, created by the sorceress Ethelda, and, thanks to Beldor, the High Wizard of the West, he can use a magic ring to change between human and dragon forms. He’s restless for adventure and misses his friends, so he sneaks away to visit Beldor at his cave. The wizard and his companion, Ydda, help the boy forge a magical sword. Dirk then plans to visit the island of Codhaven, where his beloved Galinda lives and is about to celebrate her 13th birthday. However, a strange white bird has been observing Dirk—an extension of Ethelda, who craves revenge for the death of her husband, Augurald, who was killed by dragon fire. She’s also manipulating other people who might help her find the Wand of the Black Sphere. It turns out that a cracked, black orb is now in the possession of Roman commander Lucius Cassius Taurinus—and that Dirk may have a second, intact wand. The third volume of Stevens’ middle-grade series is a perfect balance of education and entertainment. A few light opening scenes reintroduce readers to the city of London before it became a teeming metropolis. Unusual terms, such as “triclinium”—a room for lounging and eating—are unobtrusively defined in the story. Along with vibrant history, the author ably develops two major themes. The first is that animals should be treated like people; Dirk can speak with various fauna and has friends among them, such as Pinkfoot, a goose. The boy protagonist also longs to visit the wild while toiling on his family’s farm. The second theme is that family is about more than mere blood relationship; Dirk still considers his dragon-mother, Gernith, to be an important part of his life regardless of the curse that initially bound them together. Detailed illustrations by the author enliven scenes throughout.
The lively final volume of a charming series.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9963839-8-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Dragon's Egg Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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