A hero’s first adventure turns out to be a grand and satisfying one.
This fantasy debut sees a young man suffer separation from his family and enslavement, yet he remains hopeful with the guidance of an otherworldly entity.
Fourteen-year-old Eloy and his family live in a village on the savanna. While adulthood fast approaches, he one day watches his favorite group of cats in the nearby wild. When a rival pack of felines slaughters the cats he loves, Eloy longs for the safety and warmth of home. His father later sends him and his sister, 9-year-old Francena, to acquire tallow from Kalb, a neighbor who keeps livestock. Kalb offers the tallow for free and tells Eloy that he and his family need to pack up and leave the village immediately. On the way home, Eloy runs into Totten, the local drunk. Yet Totten is cleareyed and able to stand up straight. He says, “I may look like Totten, but I’m not. I’m simply using his body. You can call me Amicus.” The being recommends that Eloy’s family travel south and gives him a flawless, polished black stone with a hole in its center. Amicus says the stone is a key and that wealth awaits him. When savage marauders attack the village, Eloy and his family flee. Heading south, however, lands them in the clutches of slavers who make Eloy’s parents choose between their children’s freedom and their own lives. In this savage, lyrical series opener, Timmins places strong characters in nightmarish situations, all the better to ensnare readers. Her prose often celebrates the primal connection between people and the land. After Eloy and his friend Corwin escape enslavement and a brutal battle, they find a forest that “swallowed them into a place of cradled life. It contrasted everything they had experienced in a nourishing and deeply necessary way.” Timmins’ use of fantasy elements, like telepathy and monstrous raiders, is effectively conservative. Heart and philosophy buoy this dark tale, in which the hero is reminded that “there is a lot of strength in being humble,” and audiences experience the epic in a relatively slim volume.
A hero’s first adventure turns out to be a grand and satisfying one.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-88313-6
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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