Full of family secrets, mysteries, time travel, deities, and more, this work delivers a bold, richly realized tale from a...
Three sisters discover truths about their family that they never imagined in this debut fantasy novel.
Teenage sisters Charlemagne, Cairo, and Pendragon (“Penny”) Agonistes are devastated when their mother, Athene, disappears. Their father is so emotionally unequipped to cope with the loss that he decides his daughters should leave America and live with their grandparents in England. Upon arriving across the pond, they discover that their family is even more eccentric than they realized. To begin with, their grandmother and grandfather like to be referred to as the Ogg and Gaffer. Then, shortly after the sisters arrive, their two hosts take the girls to a wake for someone they didn’t even know, which is filled with strange people performing bizarre customs. They involve Charlemagne in one of the rituals, during which she seems to slip out of her body and wake up as a different person—a Lady of Serendip—in a different time and place, the magical land of Seraphina. She lives an entire life in the span of a few minutes before coming back to herself at the party. Her sisters then have similar experiences, and Cairo is later hunted by two anachronistic mythical beings called Hamquist and Crakes, who are the cause of Athene’s vanishing. Although the novel makes use of a number of familiar fantasy tropes, it blends them in a fresh and exciting way that rarely feels less than utterly original. One of the story’s central conflicts regarding the goddess of Seraphina, who may not be as beneficent as she seems, is particularly intriguing. Houghton’s prose is similarly strong. The narrative explores the sisters’ attributes (“Penny was the cleverest of the sisters. Too clever, Charlemagne sometimes worried. It distanced her from people her own age and she didn’t have many friends to begin with”). And while the characters aren’t as three-dimensional as they could be, the book’s world is brought to life so vividly that a reader rarely notices this as a major flaw, particularly because the sisters’ bond is depicted with such authenticity and love.
Full of family secrets, mysteries, time travel, deities, and more, this work delivers a bold, richly realized tale from a promising new author.Pub Date: June 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-909845-94-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tenebris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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