A fine fantasy novel that will provide readers with a good weekend escape from reality.
Doty (When Dead Ain’t Enough, 2012, etc.) conjures a magical world of witches, wizards and war in this high-energy first installment of an epic-fantasy series.
This dark tale charges out of the gate as Rat—a street orphan about 6 or 7 years old—runs through a medieval marketplace with his “one good eye” fixed on an unsuspecting man’s purse of coins. Little Rat, covered with diseased sores and clothed in filthy rags, survives by hiding and stealing whatever he can. When Rat successfully steals the purse, angry market vendors chase him into a one-way alley, where he hides in the shadows. Unbeknownst to Rat, his hiding skill is a form of magic that allows him to wrap shadows around himself. Enter Lord Roland, a respected and feared clan witch, who is impressed by Rat’s magical potential. He stops the mob from hurting the raggedy Rat and takes him to his castle, the House of Elhiyne, where he and his wife, AnnaRail, eventually adopt him as a son. Rat is renamed Morgin, and he often butts heads with his powerful grandmother, the witch Olivia. She and Roland school him in the art of magic and swordsmanship over several years. After an ancient ancestral conflict between clans leads to war, the adult Morgin has an argument with Olivia, and she banishes him from Elhiyne; nonetheless, he vows to fight to save his family. While the book’s minor characters can be a bit clichéd (a beautiful blonde angel helps Morgin), most of the main characters are well-rounded and have human emotions; for example, the fearsome old Olivia is shown to have a soft spot in her heart for family. Meanwhile, Morgin’s struggles as he deals with his own fears make him a very sympathetic hero. Readers who like action will find gruesome battle scenes reminiscent of The Iliad, with much death and hacking of body parts. A romantic subplot between Morgin and his beautiful wife, Rhianne, while intriguing, doesn’t overwhelm the action. However, the history of the different clans can be confusing, and the ending contains some unresolved issues, which may disappoint some readers. That said, the conclusion carefully props open the door for the author’s next chapter.
A fine fantasy novel that will provide readers with a good weekend escape from reality.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938701887
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Telemachus Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
