A continuation—and deepening—of a saga set in the Balkans in the early modern period.
In this second volume of a sweeping trilogy of 17th-century Croatia, the arrival of a baron’s brother-in-law and his men disrupts castle life.
At the end of the first volume of Bald’s (The House of Baric Part One: Shields Down, 2015) series, Resi Kokkinos, the daughter of an Ottoman Greek merchant, had finally started to settle into life in the castle of her new husband, a young Croatian baron named Mauro Baric. She had begun to love her husband, after their dreaded arranged marriage, to learn the customs of the foreign court, and even to make some friends. At the beginning of this new volume, the serenity of the Baric castle is upended with the arrival of Resi’s brother, Patrik, and his brothers in arms. The elder generation orchestrated Resi and Mauro’s marriage to quell a family feud, but the encounter between the hotheaded Patrik and the prideful Mauro brings these buried tensions to the surface. As in Bald’s previous book, the narrative and the research go hand in hand. For instance, the appearance of Patrik’s men—who hail from as far afield as Denmark and Persia—serves as an opportunity to highlight the ethnic complexity of 17th-century Europe and Croatia’s historical role as “the cross-roads of many cultures.” This middle volume is of epic proportions in and of itself. Some readers may lack the patience to wait for the tensions raised in the first pages to come to blows a full hundred pages later. Likewise, the passages devoted to things like the logistics of baking a marzipan cake will likely not satisfy those hungry for sword fights and action. But by the same token, Bald’s attention to the nuances of castle life—including the dreams and labors of servants—is laudable. And in the end, this trilogy is a grand drama. The conflicts, intrigues, and romances among the cast of characters intensify, and readers who have come this far should not only be compelled to read through to the end, but be eagerly awaiting the final installment.
A continuation—and deepening—of a saga set in the Balkans in the early modern period.Pub Date: March 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943594-01-6
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Hillwaker Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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