Death remains a mystery, as Harrison explores the meaning it gives to life.
Meditations on mortality and quasi-incestuous desire inform this thoughtful, occasionally rambling novel.
Making his fictional return to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Harrison (True North, 2004, etc.) tells the story of a death and its aftermath through four different narrators. The first is Donald, a man of mixed Chippewa-Finnish blood, who reflects on his life as he suffers through the final stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He’s a 45-year-old man of deep spirituality and profound dignity, and he’s determined to assume control over his last days. The final section’s narrator is Cynthia, Donald’s wife, who is still trying to come to terms with his death five months later. He had enriched her life in ways that her wealthy family never could, and she had married him because he was so unlike her pedophile father. These sections are by far the novel’s strongest, leaving the reader to wonder how and why Harrison chose the two narrators in the middle. One is K, a free spirit with a Mohawk haircut, who is the stepson of Cynthia’s brother, David. K helps Donald through his last days, while sleeping with Donald’s daughter, Clare, and lusting after her mother. Though the familial ties are too close for comfort, Cynthia occasionally feels twinges of desire for her daughter’s cousin/lover as well. The weakest section of the novel is narrated by David, who hasn’t been able to come to terms with unearned wealth as well as his sister has, and whose life balances good works with mental instability. It seems that their disgraced father has somehow influenced both David’s character and his fate. As the last three narrators resume their lives after Donald’s death, it appears to each of them that his spirit has not died with him and perhaps is now inhabiting a bear. Studying Chippewa spirituality, daughter Clare comes to believe this most strongly, which makes one wonder why she and perhaps her brother weren’t narrators instead of K and David.
Death remains a mystery, as Harrison explores the meaning it gives to life.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-1838-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Arden has shaped a world that neatly straddles the seen and the unseen, where readers will hear echoes of stories from...
Arden’s supple, sumptuous first novel transports the reader to a version of medieval Russia where history and myth coexist.
In a village in the northern woods where her father is the overlord, Vasya, a girl who has inherited her royal grandmother’s understanding of magic and the spirits that inhabit the everyday world, is born to a mother who dies in childhood. Raised by a kind father, an anxious and spiteful stepmother, a wise nurse, and four older siblings, the feisty and near-feral girl—“too tall, skinny as a weasel, feet and face like a frog”—learns to talk with horses and befriends the household and forest spirits that live in and around the village. These, say the handsome young priest who has been exiled to serve their household, are demons and deserve to be exorcised. The battle between Vasya and driven Konstantin, who spends his free time painting icons, fuels the plot, as does the presence of two of the old gods, who represent death and fear. Arden has obviously immersed herself in Russian history and culture, but as a consummate storyteller, she never lets the details of place and time get in the way of a compelling and neatly structured narrative. Her main story, which has the unmistakable shape of an original fairy tale, is grounded in the realities of daily life in the time period, where the top of a large stove serves as a bed for the elderly and the ill and the dining hall of the Grand Prince of Moscow reeks of “mead and dogs, dust and humanity.” Even minor characters are given their own sets of longings and fears and impact the trajectory of the story.
Arden has shaped a world that neatly straddles the seen and the unseen, where readers will hear echoes of stories from childhood while recognizing the imagination that has transformed old material into something fresh.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-88593-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Fascinating, and not for the faint of heart.
The final part of Islington’s prodigious, sprawling fantasy trilogy (An Echo of Things To Come, 2017, etc.), in which the religious-philosophical-magical-temporal war reaches its conclusion.
Again Islington supplies a synopsis and glossary; they help, but not much. The Venerate, immortal shape-shifting wizards, wield a higher-order magic called kan, which emanates from the Darklands. However, they now serve an evil god and perhaps always have. Four friends have resolved to defeat them. Caeden, a Venerate who once did terrible wrongs in their service, bears the knowledge that he will, or already has, kill his friend and ally Davian. Davian, whose ability to use kan exceeds even Caeden's, becomes trapped in the past, where he must learn how to build kan-powered machines in order to escape. Asha channels the enormous power of her Essence, magic deriving from her personal life force, to maintain the Boundary confining the horrors of the Darklands; the heavy price she pays is entombment within a virtual-reality bubble. Wirr, now Prince Torin the Northwarden, must rally his people to hold off armies of religious fanatics and Darklands monsters long enough for the others to succeed. So what do we have here, a thaumaturgical-alchemical extravaganza? A teenage superpower fantasy to rival Marvel comics? What with the unflagging pace, so many moving parts, and so much intricate, lavish, and sometimes intimidating detail, it's nigh impossible to ascertain whether it all adds up. What matters is the author's unshakable conviction that it does—a conviction that eventually we come to share, if only by osmosis. One intractable flaw: Though there are so many immortals running around, we don't feel the weight of all their years and deeds. It's more like time's collapsed into a dimensionless present.
Fascinating, and not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-27418-0
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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