A fantasy in which good-natured heroes drift through one battle too many.
This sequel sees the champions of Palatovia fight a power-hungry lord on multiple fronts.
The city of Centuria has been destroyed. Lord Emalf, aided by vast demonic hordes, still searches for several artifacts that will help him rule the world of Palatovia. One of those relics, the Book of Stars, is in 10-year-old Ptolemy’s possession. But the boy wizard is aboard an airship piloted by Pepper, a former Centurian warrior. When a dragon attacks the ship, Ptolemy falls to the woods below. Back in the rubble of Centuria, Gen. Gathar leads a team in search of survivors. The only one the band locates is Nydraia, one of the water-wielding nes kaliba. The general and his group head to the neighboring kingdom of Salidon to learn more about their own missing King Katimi. Meanwhile, Ptolemy ends up in the care of the lagartos (a lizard people). Their elder, Krangalson, reminds the boy that “the stars tell us many things. They can point us in the right direction and…lead us down terrible paths.” Ptolemy later reunites with his father, Gen Gathar, and the brave band in the city of Chugean. There, a magical table combines with the Book of Stars to reveal that the key to Lord Emalf’s defeat lies in the catacombs beneath Centuria. In this action-oriented fantasy novel, Harris (Fall of Centuria, 2015) and debut author Creedon continue fleshing out vivid characters and places, such as King Roberts of Salidon and the eclectic Chugean, which allows readers to breathe between battle sequences. Some concepts are fascinating enough to warrant more exploration than they receive, like the table “made from a world tree” that “soaks in all information that occurs in the natural world.” The main plot paints good and evil in black-and-white terms, leaving little room for nuance aside from “we shall not let our enemies control us. Chugean has a race planned next week and that race will happen.” The clashes, which feature everything from sea monsters to giant spiders, are imaginatively conceived but a touch overwrought. The narrative glides in for a predictably happy ending.
A fantasy in which good-natured heroes drift through one battle too many.Pub Date: June 10, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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