An intriguing debut in a well-drawn ancient setting populated with shallow leaders who care for either their people or their...
In Sisken’s debut novel, the first in a trilogy about the end of the Minoan Empire, a young priestess questions her gods in the face of the destruction of her island home.
Cavanila cannot stand by while the people in her home of Akrotiri, capital of the island Thera, suffer after an earthquake. As Sisken stresses, Cavanila’s priorities always align with the good of her people, often making her a character who is too noble and selfless to be true, especially as her decisions cause her to first disobey her priest/prince father, Rhadamantis, and later King Minos himself. But while the ruling men frequently chastise her for her independence, she is permitted to continue following the path she sets for herself, even after she begins questioning whether or not the gods she serves even exist. As the crisis on Thera grows worse—earthquakes are just the first sign that the volcano in the center of the island will soon explode—Cavanila takes on a more prominent role as a leader. Under her father’s command, she’s made the high priestess of the refugee settlement on the island of Nios. As refugees from Thera settle in the Minoan capital of Knossos, Minos believes that Cavanila—despite her unorthodox rules about allowing commoners to have a voice in their own governance—can help integrate the Therans with the Knossians. Sisken’s setting, filled with gods and rituals based on archaeological evidence from the long-vanished Minoan Empire, comes to life in the descriptions of the fire and flames that destroyed much of Thera in the 17th century B.C. But while the natural disaster and its relationship—or not—to the gods is the plot’s most interesting conceit, the story focuses primarily on the political machinations of Minos’ court as well as its fairly one-dimensional characters, including the cold, power-hungry high priestess Jenora and Cavanila’s noble and crown-loyal love interest, Bardok.
An intriguing debut in a well-drawn ancient setting populated with shallow leaders who care for either their people or their own power.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615940274
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Parthenos Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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