A carefully crafted and empowering coming-of-age tale that adds welcome diversity to the fantasy shelves.
In the matrilineal monarchy of Tequende, when second-born children reach the tender age of 15, their families must surrender them to be trained as the mightiest soldiers in the land, known as the Second Guard.
Talimendra Sanchez Kalloryn of the Sun Guild is one such recruit, sworn to uphold the Oath of Guilds to serve and protect the queen at all costs. Fellow recruits Zarif Baz Hasan of the Moon Guild and Chey Maconde of the Earth Guild join her to forge an earnest triumvirate supporting one another as fledgling warriors, up to and including their challenges at the Final Tournament. This realm’s setting has a colonial Mesoamerican sensibility, with one city called New Seville and a small immigrant population of Arabites from the Far World. Socially, the Sun, Moon and Earth Guilds correspond to merchant, intellectual and working classes, each with its own culture and rituals. Tested via multiple, layered moral and ethical dilemmas that have modern resonance, Tali swings between moments of confusion (“What is true if everything I’ve been taught to believe is false?”) and mildly subversive clarity (“Sometimes disobeying orders is the only way to follow them”). Vaughn is the pen name for Julia Durango and Tracie Zimmer, and working together, the two writers prove to be competent worldbuilders, cleverly introducing each chapter with a page of background out of a fictitious Tequende history book.
A carefully crafted and empowering coming-of-age tale that adds welcome diversity to the fantasy shelves. (Fantasy. 11-14)Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4231-6909-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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