A lengthy but thoroughly captivating tale and a commendable series launch.
A young nobleman and aspiring mage gets caught up in an attempt to assassinate a king and stop a war in Hubbard’s (The Dark Hour, 2016, etc.) fantasy novel.
Nineteen-year-old Kane Bailey is sorcerer Master Cypher’s apprentice in the Consaria kingdom. One night, while making potions in the study, a female intruder accosts Kane, demanding to know where King Hugo is. She tries to kill the monarch but fails, narrowly evading capture and bringing along an unwilling Kane as an expedient hostage. Callie, the would-be assassin, considers ransoming Kane, as he’s a noble, but she’s already angered her clan leader, Giacomo Kently. It seems that the Jackal, a legendary killer, had farmed out the assassination job to the clan and will want his payment returned—coins that the clan has already spent. Callie pins her hopes on the “Three Roses,” which Kane overheard the king mention to Master Cypher on the night of the attempted assassination. Neither Kane nor Callie knows what the Three Roses actually are, but Callie is sure that they must be valuable—and that they somehow relate to the ongoing war against the neighboring land of Lonsaran, which King Hugo’s been avidly promoting. The two’s search, meanwhile, will take them to seedy places like The Silver Vein, which is rife with hooligans who won’t think twice about abducting a nobleman—or doing something worse. Along the way, Callie and Kane keep their eyes open for the lethal Jackal, who’s specifically targeted her for his refund. Hubbard’s story highlights a few familiar fantasy genre elements: goblins rear their ugly heads, and Callie’s clan buys a magic-negating crystal with the coins that they accepted for the proposed hit. But the author concentrates mainly on his story’s human element, and as such, his characters are well-developed. Kane’s noble status makes him rather stuffy, and he’s shown to be disconcerted by a decent meal of fatty steak, sans utensils. He also witnesses debauchery that’s a sharp contrast to his noble life; in The Silver Vein alone, Kane spots a cockfight, a couple engaged in public sex, blatant drunkards, and a bevy of fresh corpses. The highly detailed descriptions are coupled with contemporary-sounding dialogue, as when Callie assures Kane that his use of magic “totally kick[s] ass.” Hubbard doesn’t specify the year in which the story takes place, which subverts expectations that some readers may have for a tale set in centuries past. Memorable moments include Callie “city-jumping” (which is sometimes more bluntly called “roof-jumping”) and one sinister character requesting volunteers for a religious practice called the Gateway to Heaven, which is, quite simply, torture. The impressively expansive plot includes men and women being conscripted into the king’s army and an intriguing, somewhat familiar religion featuring Micah, the son of God. The characters’ quest to find the Roses gets sidetracked during the final act, which briefly separates Callie and Kane, but the hunt will clearly continue in the planned sequel.
A lengthy but thoroughly captivating tale and a commendable series launch.Pub Date: June 4, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 509
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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