Sequel to Sister Light, Sister Dark, a fantasy wherein women trained in mirror-magic can call forth dark twins who appear by moonlight or candlelight. Warrior Jenna's life thus far has conformed to the prophecy that she is the Anna, a sort of demigoddess who's also destined to become queen. Meanwhile, King Gorum has been deposed by the evil Kalas and now leads a small band of rebels. Then Jenna and her companions, in a magical interlude, meet the revered founder of their order, Alta, and receive strange gifts. Eventually, they return to the real world, where Gorum has been slain and his brother Carum, whom Jenna loves, languishes in Kalas' dungeons. Jenna determines on a stealthy assault; Kalas captures her, and she joins Carum in his dungeon. So, to nobody's surprise, Jenna will need the help of her dark sister to escape and free Carum, and kill Kalas. Tired. thoroughly predictable stuff, padded out with important-sounding fluff: strictly for Dark/Light addicts.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1989
ISBN: 0765343584
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
Categories: GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY | GENERAL FANTASY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
71
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A peasant boy gets an introduction to civilization, such as it is.
Moshfegh’s gloomy fifth novel is set in the medieval village of Lapvona, ruled by Villiam, who’s paranoid and cruel when he’s not inept. (For instance, he sends murderous bandits into town if he hears of dissent among the farmers.) Marek, a 13-year-old boy, is becoming increasingly curious about his brutish provenance. He questions whether his mother indeed died in childbirth, as his father, Jude, insists. (The truth is more complicated, of course.) He struggles to reconcile the disease and death he witnesses with the stories of a forgiving God he was raised with. His sole source of comfort is Ina, the village wet nurse. During the course of the year tracked by the novel, Marek finds his way to Villiam, who fills his time with farcical and occasionally grotesque behavior. Villiam’s right-hand man, the village priest, is comically ignorant about Scripture, and Villiam compels Marek and a woman assistant into some scatological antics. The fact that another assistant is named Clod gives a sense of the intellectual atmosphere. Which is to say that the novel is constructed from familiar Moshfegh-ian stuff: dissolute characters, a willful rejection of social norms, the occasional gross-out. At her best, she’s worked that material into stark, brilliant character studies (Eileen, 2015) or contemporary satires (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, 2018). Here, though, the tone feels stiff and the story meanders. The Middle Ages provide a promising setting for her—she describes a social milieu that’s only clumsily established hierarchies, religion, and an economy, and she wants us to question whether we’ve evolved much beyond it. But the assortment of dim characters and perverse delusions does little more than repetitively expose the brutality of (as Villiam puts it) “this stupid life.”
A blackhearted but wayward yarn.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-30026-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FANTASY | GENERAL FICTION
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