A solid follow-up to the series that answers many questions.
In this second volume of Donoghue’s fantasy series, a scientist and his friends hope to defeat villains in the search for a lost civilization’s mysterious stones.
Shadows of the Stone Benders (2016) introduced Anlon Cully, a biochemist who made a fortune and retired at 42 to enjoy Lake Tahoe and his yacht. But Anlon soon found a new occupation: investigating his archaeologist uncle Devlin Wilson’s suspicious death, connected with a set of stone artifacts with powerful qualities that point to an ancient, highly developed civilization. For example, a Tuliskaera, or Flash Stone, can slice through any object, making it a formidable tool or weapon. Villains want these stones, and Cully barely escaped with his life following a confrontation. Now he’s recuperating at Lake Tahoe with his girlfriend, the pink-haired, tattooed, and pierced Eleanor “Pebbles” McCarver, and their friend Jennifer Stevens, a Massachusetts police detective who helped investigate a case in Book 1. Together, they puzzle over information Devlin left behind and try to learn more about the stones and where more artifacts are located. It’s a race to find the artifacts before other searchers, some of whom will stop at nothing to get their hands on the stones, which, it turns out, have their own back story involving an ancient tragedy, a grieving mother, and a Betrayer. In this follow-up to Book 1, Donoghue similarly provides an Indiana Jones–like mélange of archaeology, treasure, villains, jungles, and ancient science. (Although it’s possible to follow this book as a stand-alone volume, it’ll make more sense read in sequence.) His characters are well-defined, important in a story so driven by the particulars of how an unknown technology works, sections that will be best appreciated by readers with a taste for engineering. Overall, Donoghue is conscientious in his explanations, which do offer verisimilitude but can become a bit dull, especially the careful and lengthy consideration of Wilson’s ambiguous maps. But the series also offers excitement, suspense, and action, together with near-mystical encounters with a long-dead woman of the ancient civilization, helping to balance sometimes-dry science and logistics.
A solid follow-up to the series that answers many questions.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9973164-4-5
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Leaping Leopard Enterprises
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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