High fantasy marked by restraint, subtlety, and deep character maneuvering.
This third installment of a series sees the fire-wielding Vatra clan one step closer to escaping its desert prison.
One thousand years ago, three elemental daeva clans—the Danai, the Valkirin, and the Marakai—imprisoned a fourth group, the Vatras, in a desert called the Kiln. Now, a fire-wielding Vatra named Nicodemus has escaped. He seeks beings known as talismans, who can break the storms that enclose the Kiln. Enter half-daeva Nazafareen; her lover, Darius; and the band of heroes aboard the ship Chione. They sail the Austral Ocean with Capt. Mafuone in search of Sakhet-ra-katme, one of the original talismans who sealed the Vatras. Hopefully, the long-lived Sakhet can point Nazafareen toward the child she hid years ago, 12-year-old Mebetimmunedjem. On the ship Asperta, Meb “the Mouse” is a Marakai who can’t manipulate water like the rest of the seafaring daevas. She’s a member of the crew, under Capt. Kasaika, with no idea of the forces converging on her. Meanwhile, in Persian Samarqand, Javid has become a successful delivery pilot for the merchant Izad Asabana. One of their best customers is Prince Shahak, who’s addicted to the magical rush of spell dust. And at Val Moraine, Victor Dessarian punishes his son Galen with the task of tunneling through the ice wall surrounding a holdfast. In this latest volume in The Fourth Talisman fantasy series, Ross (Solis, 2018, etc.) keeps all of her narrative plates spinning at top speed. While dialogue drives her plots, lyrical filigree exalts the whole, as in the line “One by one, the stars winked out, as if devoured by some slouching celestial beast.” And though a vast war threatens her alternate ancient Persia, the author once more proves the master of small character moments, as when Nazafareen feels that “something shifted in her heart” after seeing an Aurora in the night sky “bleeding pure light.” Cast members from Solis return in frightening ways, including Apollonian acolyte Thena, whose mind goes blank as she murders someone. By the end, Ross has primed audiences for an epic conclusion.
High fantasy marked by restraint, subtlety, and deep character maneuvering.Pub Date: June 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990481-6-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Acorn
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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