An enjoyably original tale: part steampunk, part horror, and part fantastical commentary on the effects of human-generated...
In a fantasy set in a surreal world of pipes and plungers, the fates of two young women intertwine.
Plunger in hand, 19-year-old Seg leaves the Orphanage, the only home she has known, to fulfill her destiny as a Plumbess, adept in the mysteries of Plumbing. This is real plumbing but with a mind-boggling twist. The massive Orphanage trains waifs (their origins are cloudy) in the intricacies of sewage treatment, pipework, and drains and tells them how to clean up filth and keep water flowing before sending them out to serve hapless humanity and powerful Pipe Lords. Plungers are weapons, divining rods, obstetric tools, and readers and destroyers of souls. Drains respond to a Plumbess’ power in arresting and at times horrific ways: A flooded library agrees to drain itself; a drain in a sink obligingly enlarges to accommodate body parts. (This book is not for the squeamish.) Haunted by nightmares and her hatred of a fellow Plumbess named Eck (discovered as a child in a den of snakes and unable to think of herself as human), Seg finds work in the parched manor of Hope Springs, where a Baron controls the water source as a protest against corruption. Fawley’s (An Exception, 2018, etc.) novel is a unique and audacious take on fantasy worldbuilding despite introducing its vision of Plumbing sorcery with a weighty, enigmatic solemnity that may induce head-scratching and a disinclination to read further. (The book’s larger fault is its abrupt ending, intended perhaps to signal a sequel but giving the impression that a page is missing.) Fortunately, patience will be rewarded for those seeking wildly imaginative and thought-provoking storytelling. Eck serves a wealthy Pipe Lord whose towering, water-rich Manor is capped by a permanent storm and wrapped in a web of pipework that captures “the very moisture from the sky.” Disturbing wrongness there (the Dry Princess will haunt readers) will push Eck to untold feats of Plumbing, spark a profound sacrifice, and change Seg’s life as a Plumbess forever.
An enjoyably original tale: part steampunk, part horror, and part fantastical commentary on the effects of human-generated droughts and floods and the connection between civilization and proper drainage.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72094-510-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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