A suitably beguiling and unsettling first book in a series that promises deeper, darker escapism.
A troubled teenager enters the fairy world to save her sister in this fantasy romance by Lee (Tales of the River Vine, 2018, etc.).
Eighteen-year-old Charlotte and her 14-year-old sister, Anna, are on the run from an abusive family situation, but soon after their bus crosses the Wisconsin border, it breaks down. An insistent “Voice” in Charlotte’s heart tells her not to get on the replacement bus, but she and her sister do, and a second breakdown leaves them stranded at a farm motel near the stone-wall border of a fairy realm. Anna is soon spirited away, but Charlotte, who can see what others can’t—the decay hidden beneath the illusion of normalcy—vows to breach the wall and do whatever she needs to do in order to save her sister. It turns out that Anna isn’t the only one in danger; by crossing the boundary and going up against the powerful woman known as “the Lady,” Charlotte brings another being, “the Bloody Prince,” back to life and reignites a civil war in the fairy realm. Charlotte has no one she can trust, as nothing is as it seems, and worst of all, she might just be falling in love with the aforementioned prince. Lee writes from a third-person, present-tense point of view, but the tale is still told very much from Charlotte’s perspective, spurning exposition in favor of snippets of teenage angst. Charlotte emerges as a believable survivor—strong, determined, and devoted to her sister but also vulnerable, with a deeply buried sense of hope. The only off note is her heightened, Buffy-like sassiness, which seems less natural than genre-driven, but it’s still handled well. Anna is similarly convincing as the resentful younger sister; the fairy folk walk the line between being straightforward villains and antiheroes. The fairy realm itself is more grim than enchanting (think the Upside Down from the Netflix TV series Stranger Things), and the fact that Charlotte is trapped there—an echo of her family situation—lends an uneasy edge to the would-be romance.
A suitably beguiling and unsettling first book in a series that promises deeper, darker escapism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-949428-00-1
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Aionios Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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