Rote setting and unnecessarily dense exposition, enlivened by Fallon’s teeming imagination.
A spoiled princess and her dwarf slave prove surprisingly effective adversaries against a host of contenders for power in Fallon’s saga of forbidden love and revenge, the first in a trilogy.
The Demon Child trilogy (Medalon, 2004, etc.) and the Wolfblade Trilogy launched with this volume are both part of Fallon’s over-arching Hythrun Chronicles. Here, a complicated series of political dealings result in the marriage of Princess Marla Wolfblade, barely 16, to Laran Krakenshield, one of the Warlords of Hythria. Too bad Marla’s not in love with him—that honor goes to the dashing Nash Hawksword, who could be the princess’s Achilles heel if the maneuvers of expertly sneaky Alija Eaglespike succeed. Much skullduggery ensues, and for a few hundred pages, Fallon is happy to simply keep throwing out characters and schemes until the narrative achieves a critical mass of paranoid confusion. In the process, she neglects the culture of slaves and court’esa (sexual servants for the nobility) that provides the book’s most interesting scenes. The story finally gels with some shockingly cold-blooded betrayals and the looming prospect of war.
Rote setting and unnecessarily dense exposition, enlivened by Fallon’s teeming imagination.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-765-30992-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
A wholly original, engrossing, disturbing, and beautiful book. You’ve never read anything quite like this, and you won’t...
A spellbinding story of world-altering power and revenge from debut novelist Hawkins.
Carolyn’s life changed forever when she was 8. That was the year her ordinary suburban subdivision was destroyed and the man she now calls Father took her and 11 other children to study in his very unusual Library. Carolyn studied languages—and not only human ones. The other children studied the ways of beasts, learned healing and resurrection, and wandered in the lands of the dead or in possible futures. Now they’re all in their 30s, and Father is missing. Carolyn and the others are trying to find him—but Carolyn has her own agenda and her own feelings about the most dangerous of her adopted siblings, David, who has spent years perfecting the arts of murder and war. Carolyn is an engaging heroine with a wry sense of humor, and Steve, the ordinary American ally she recruits, helps keep the book grounded in reality despite the ever growing strangeness that swirls around them. Like the Library itself, the book is bigger, darker, and more dangerous than it seems. The plot never flags, and it’s never predictable. Hawkins has created a fascinating, unusual world in which ordinary people can learn to wield breathtaking power—and he’s also written a compelling story about love and revenge that never loses sight of the human emotions at its heart.
A wholly original, engrossing, disturbing, and beautiful book. You’ve never read anything quite like this, and you won’t soon forget it.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-553-41860-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
PROFILES
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
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