A brisk and readable fantasy tale that casts a familiar spell.
In this first YA fantasy novel in a series, Forrester (Empire Awakening, 2018, etc.) tells the story of a teen warrior-in-training searching for his family members across a magical realm.
Fifteen-year-old twin brothers Jeno and Chiro are students at Castle Maarn, where their father, Gen. Thanadol, sent them to be trained as rangers by the priests of the god Tanir. One night, the twins awaken after having a nightmare about their mother—from whom their father took them away at age 4; in it, she’s enslaved by an evil wizard in the magical Realm of Sosaram. Jeno shrugs it off and goes back to sleep, but Chiro sneaks away to enter a nearby cave that, according to a gnome they recently met, separates their world from Sosaram. As Jeno angrily rushes to catch up with Chiro, he thinks that “His brother must be out of his mind or afflicted by some charm. Every righteous human knew that magical creatures tricked mortals down paths leading to their doom. It was a core tenet of their faith.” Jeno steps through the portal and is transported to a beautiful world of forests and flowers, although he knows that he must be careful not to be corrupted by its magic. Sosaram proves to be more than just picturesque gardens, however; it’s also a land that’s suffering from war and blight, where elves and dwarves worship ancient gods, and dragons rule the skies. With the help of his best friend (and secret crush) Freyia, as well as some new acquaintances, Jeno pursues his sibling across the dynamic landscape. It later turns out that Sosaram has many surprises in store for Jeno, including one involving his mother that will change everything that he believed about his religion—and about himself. Forrester’s prose is spirited and propulsive, ensuring that readers feel the same thrills and scares that his characters do: “It was a dragon…gazing directly at him. He could feel a faint pressure in his mind, something reaching, something pushing, something calling out to him. The sensation was maddening.” In terms of worldbuilding, characters, and plot, the novel stays in the familiar territory of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with the requisite YA concerns of parentage and responsibility. Jeno is a bit of a spoilsport, but the supporting cast—including the aforementioned Freyia; Shani, a wood-elf healer who’s willing to cut off her own finger to save a stranger; and Karn, a loudly dressed half elf known as the “king of these streets”—provides more enjoyable companionship. The religious angle, which pits the magical polytheism of Sosaram against the anti-magic monotheism of Jeno’s world, adds another layer of tension, but it’ll be easy for readers to predict the outcome of that struggle. The breakneck pacing, after the exposition-choked opening chapter, consistently pulls readers forward and quickly immerses them in the world’s politics and conflicts. Aficionados of YA fantasy should enjoy this offering and the sequels that are sure to follow.
A brisk and readable fantasy tale that casts a familiar spell.Pub Date: April 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-160682-1
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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