A historical fantasy that crackles with electricity.
A powerful amnesiac must escape her captors to search for her past.
In this fantasy, Nazafareen, “a mortal with da?va blood and the ability to shatter magic,” is being held in Nocturne, a realm of perpetual night. Her right hand is missing, and she remembers virtually nothing of her past, which is how the element-wielding da?vas like it. She’s closest with Darius of House Dessarian, who carried her through the Dominion gate after her magic-nullifying powers overloaded. The elementals keep Nazafareen hidden from the Valkirin, another clan, who want her dead. She’d prefer the truth about her past, however, to remaining an outcast among the da?vas. When a Valkirin messenger arrives from the Val Moraine holdfast, she learns that she must surrender or risk creating a war between da?va clans. Meanwhile, at Val Moraine, a fallen warrior named Culach, blind and covered in severe burns, convalesces. He’s cared for by Mina, a Dessarian hostage whom he despises. Back in Nocturne, a flying machine made from ropes and fabric crashes, delivering an emissary from the mortal realm of Samarqand. As the visitor, Javid, discusses economic backchannels with Lady Tethys, Nazafareen plans her escape via airship. Unfortunately, Culach’s father, Eirik, hopes to strike a mortal blow at House Dessarian and eliminate the “abomination” it protects. In this series opener, Ross (The Thirteenth Gate, 2017, etc.) returns to the alternate ancient Persia of her Fourth Element trilogy and offers a spoiler-free reintroduction of her characters and their intertwined backstories. The author’s excitement and clarity of vision should impress those who’ve never read her before. The narrative’s magical components never overshadow the players and their struggles (Lady Tethys tells Nazafareen, regarding her amnesia, “Some people might see it as a gift. A chance to start life anew”). And the characters newly taking shape are thrilling to behold. The chimeras, for example, are “bound together by air and thus translucent except for the blood coursing through...delicately branching veins and occasional clots of darker matter.” Layered subplots featuring Culach, Mina, and Javid provide an embarrassment of riches. The finale primes audiences to learn about the legendary Vatras, who did what other elementals can’t—control fire.
A historical fantasy that crackles with electricity.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9990481-0-8
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Acorn
Review Posted Online: July 24, 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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