A spirited, if business-heavy, addition to this bear-centric fantasy series.
Skye (Churchianity Pandemic: The Blood, 2017, etc.) pits Flurry the bear against cat assassins in the latest installment of his children’s fantasy series.
Following their battle with Black Bear’d and his pirates, the walking, talking teddy bear Flurry and his fuzzy sidekicks have traveled through the animal kingdoms for two months, adventuring with old friends and winning admiration from the critters that they’ve helped. When Flurry tries to finally head for home, however, he and his friends are attacked by the cat assassins of Queen Necatual and the wolves of Furry’s old enemy, Isangrim. With the help of his pal Vallidore the wolf and the cat warrior Purratus, Flurry and his companions escape and travel to the safe cat city of Tikalico. There, under the guidance of allies old and new, they plan to strike at the true enemies behind the recent chaos. Furry learns that Necatual is working with Theran, a sorcerer who Flurry recently tangled with in his battle against the pirates. What’s more, Theran holds information about the return of Flurry’s greatest enemy of all: Jack Frost. It’s cats and wolves versus cats and wolves in this battle, with Flurry—as always—right at the center. Skye’s prose is clean, and the story speeds along like others in the series. The author excels at shuffling old characters in and out while adding new ones, playing personalities off of each other in order to create tension within the group. This volume doesn’t work as a stand-alone; much of the plot revolves around previous events and establishing conflicts for future episodes. Even so, Flurry fans will enjoy the storylines’ progression.
A spirited, if business-heavy, addition to this bear-centric fantasy series.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9988577-1-8
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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