A frothy and stirring tale that blends music, magic, and romance.
A magical being fleeing her past encounters a young pianist in this novel.
Kalida is one of the Cavern-born, beings whose magical abilities and fighting prowess have made them multi-realm conquerors. Music seems harsh and unnatural to the cold, cruel Cavern-born, but after hearing a prisoner’s song, Kalida finds herself unable to bear her home’s darkness and violence. She escapes to the woods in the realm of Andrea, where she watches the Snowden children, Christine and Charlie, grow up in a nearby manor. Penniless pianist Desmond “Des” Fairweather visits the manor one day at the urging of his friend Jake Banner, a tabloid reporter chasing a scoop that the now-adult Christine can talk to her garden flowers. Des has a tragic past—a spell gone wrong killed his parents—and is reluctant to acknowledge or practice magic. But Jake is convinced Des attracts magical beings and promises an audition with a local symphony in exchange for the musician’s help. Taking a moment to practice on Christine’s piano, Des glimpses an enigmatic woman who seems entranced by his music. The woman, of course, is Kalida. As Jake searches for a story and helps Christine tackle her problems—Charlie is missing and a cousin is scheming to acquire the manor—Des and Kalida pursue a deeper connection. But Kalida’s Cavern-born family has come to take her back to its realm, endangering the whole group. Tesh (The Monsters of Spiders’ Rest, 2017, etc.) writes movingly of Kalida’s gradual metamorphosis after hearing the prisoner’s song (“a crack in our world”), making a compelling case for the transformative power of music. Des and Jake’s interactions are snappily written, with their combative banter and Jake’s antics lending a screwball comedy appeal to balance Kalida’s heavier story. When Des and Kalida do properly meet, a mysterious connection becomes romantic a bit too quickly to not feel forced. The weight put on their sudden true love causes the novel’s later portions to feel a bit rushed. Despite these structural problems, the book delivers a fun read.
A frothy and stirring tale that blends music, magic, and romance.Pub Date: June 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60975-124-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Silver Leaf Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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