Well-crafted entertainment.
Third in the author’s Chronicles fantasy series (Medalon; Treason Keep, both 2004).
After the surrender of Medalon's armies to the invading Kariens, young R’shiel (the “demon child” of prophecy) and Tarja (the outlawed Defender captain) flee to neighboring Hythria to regroup. R’shiel has engineered the marriage of Damin Wolfblade, a Hythrun warlord, and Princess Adrina of Fardohnya, hoping to unite their nations to help oppose the Kariens. But Damin arrives home to find a power struggle underway for the throne of Hythria, while Adrina’s royal father is implacable in his hatred for the Hythruns—especially the Wolfblade clan. R’shiel and her mentor Brak are forced to call on all their godlike powers to end the conflict. Meanwhile, in the north, Tarja has recovered from injuries sustained in fighting the Kariens, and returns to guerrilla action against the invaders. In the course of healing, he has recovered from the geas that made him fall in love with R’shiel, whom he was raised to think of as his sister. Captured while trying to sabotage the ferry across the great river that divides his country, Tarja is condemned to death and taken to the Citadel in order that the Kariens can make his hanging a public example. R’shiel and Brak arrive in time to mobilize the Medalonian resistance, who free Tarja, seize the Citadel and prepare to hold out against the Kariens while awaiting reinforcements from Hythria and Fardohnya. But R’shiel still faces her greatest challenge: overcoming the Kariens’ power-hungry god Xaphista, who seeks to destroy all rival gods and subjugate all human nations under his sway. She has grown strong and confident, but killing a god may be a task beyond even her magical powers. Fallon brings her latest to a satisfying resolution, with young characters growing in response to their experience, and fantasy made credible by her realistic treatment of the details of daily life.
Well-crafted entertainment.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-30988-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.
Manic parodist Moore, fresh off a season in 1947 San Francisco (Noir, 2018), returns with a rare gift for Shakespeare fans who think A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be perfect if only it were a little more madcap.
Cast adrift by pirates together with his apprentice, halfwit giant Drool, and Jeff, his barely less intelligent monkey, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, jester to the late King Lear, washes ashore in Shakespeare’s Athens, where Cobweb, a squirrel by day and fairy by night, takes him under her wing and other parts. Soon after he encounters Robin Goodfellow (the Puck), jester to shadow king Oberon, and Nick Bottom and the other clueless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisby in a nearby forest before they present it in celebration of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the captive Amazon queen who’s captured his heart, Pocket (The Serpent of Venice, 2014, etc.) finds Robin fatally shot by an arrow. Suspected briefly of the murder himself, he’s commissioned, first by Hippolyta, then by the unwitting Theseus, to identify the Puck’s killer. Oh, and Egeus, the Duke’s steward, wants him to find and execute Lysander, who’s run off with Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, instead of marrying Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius. As English majors can attest, a remarkable amount of this madness can already be found in Shakespeare’s play. Moore’s contribution is to amp up the couplings, bawdy language, violence, and metatextual analogies between the royals, the fairies, the mechanicals, his own interloping hero, and any number of other plays by the Bard.
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
For latter-day D&D fans, a long-awaited moment. For the rest—well, maybe J.K. Rowling will write another book after all.
A walloping sword-and-sorcery fest from Rothfuss, the second volume in a projected trilogy (The Name of the Wind, 2007).
Readers of that debut—and if you weren’t a reader of the first volume, then none of the second will make any sense to you—will remember that its protagonist, Kvothe (rhymes with “quoth”), was an orphan with magical powers and, as the years rolled by, the ability to pull music out of the air and write “songs that make the minstrels weep.” The second volume finds him busily acquiring all kinds of knowledge to help his wizardly career along, for which reason he is in residence in a cool college burg, “barely more than a town, really,” that has other towns beat by a league in the arcane-knowledge department, to say nothing of cafés where you can talk elevated talk and drink “Veltish coffee and Vintish wine,” as good post-hobbits must. For one thing, the place has a direct line to a vast underground archive where pretty much everything that has ever been thought or imagined is catalogued; for another thing, anyone who is anyone in the world of eldritch studies comes by, which puts Kvothe in close proximity to the impossibly beautiful fairy Felurian, who makes hearts go flippity-flop and knows some pretty good tricks in the way of evading evil. Evil there is, and in abundance, but who cares if you’re dating such a cool creature? Rothfuss works all the well-worn conventions of the genre, with a shadow cloak here and a stinging sword there and lots of wizardry throughout, blending a thoroughly prosaic prose style with the heft-of-tome ambitions of a William T. Vollmann. This is a great big book indeed, but not much happens—which, to judge by the success of its predecessor, will faze readers not a whit.
For latter-day D&D fans, a long-awaited moment. For the rest—well, maybe J.K. Rowling will write another book after all.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7564-0473-4
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: DAW/Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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