Mainstream magical-historical romance, with major roles for Alexander the Great and his generals, from the author of two fantasy trilogies, The Hound and the Falcon and Avaryan Rising. After his victory over Darius and the Persians at Issus, Alexander is joined by Meriamon, daughter of Nectanebo, Egypt's last pharaoh. Small, dark Meriamon has magic powers and a protective ``shadow'' that is a ka-spirit of the jackal-headed god Anubis. Her purpose, for so the gods of Khemet (Egypt) have decreed, is to persuade Alexander to accept the Two Crowns of Khemet, thus thwarting and rejecting the loathed Persian overlords. After Issus, Meriamon works as a physician, among other tasks setting the broken wrist and ribs of immature Macedonian warrior Niko. Since Niko now has the use of only one arm, Alexander gives him to Meriamon as her bodyguard. As Alexander and his army proceed triumphantly to the south, he captures the island city Tyre after a prolonged struggle, unaware that Meriamon has helped him by daunting the evil magi of the priests of Melqart. Niko's arm heals, and Meriamon, who pines for Khemet and grows stronger the nearer she gets, falls in love with him. The Persian satrap, Mazaces, gladly surrenders Khemet to Alexander; the latter decrees the building of the city Alexandria on the Nile delta, then battles his way through sandstorms and magic to the desert oracle at Siwah, there to receive the secret of his true being. And at last Niko notices Meriamon. Good in its broad sweeps, magic, and period detail. But expect no insights, accept the barely tepid romance, and be ready for a muffled, distant narrative feel.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-85362-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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
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