A tantalizing series opener that leaves little room for character development.
In Walker’s fantasy debut, twin brothers accidentally unleash an ancient, malevolent force upon their father’s kingdom.
On the world of Mythos, 19-year-old twins Kian’Huard and Ko’Resh are heirs to the throne of the House of Rhuna. The brothers have been enjoying the Spring Festival in the city of Kephas, and while out riding, they find a cave leading into the nearby mountain that seems to have suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Ko’Resh, the more reckless of the two, insists that the cave simply “revealed itself” and wants to explore it. Kian’Huard reminds him the mountain is home to the sacred Temple of Osiris and that trespassers may be put to death. Nonetheless, they feel strangely compelled to walk through the cavern system. When the entrance behind them closes, Kian’Huard knows that “solveige” (or dark magic) is at work. They eventually pass a stone gateway and encounter seven powerful spirits called the Sem Lukos Resh. Six of them invade Ko’Resh’s body, while the remaining one invades Kian’Huard. The brothers are missing from Kephas for four moon cycles. Then Kian’Huard, alone, meets Kri’Attole, his mentor, outside Kephas. However, when Kian’Huard’s father, Sharram Kar’Set, tries to have them both arrested, the young man realizes that he and his brother have become puppets of the horrid spirits. For this ambitious novel, Walker crafts a tale that’s heavy on graphic visuals and Eastern religious motifs. The discipline of Tae’Heb, for example, addresses “seven main power centers within the body,” like chakras, “each tuned to a frequency that supported specific functions of the body and psyche.” When Ko’Resh’s power centers are corrupted by the Sem Lukos Resh, he gains superpowers, including speed and strength. When the brothers battle, Walker’s prose is baroque in style: “Swords flashed in shafts of light...arcing explosions of electric rainbows ringing with death lust.” The narrative straddles centuries, as the villainous Sharram Saal hopes to manipulate Rhuna bloodlines to create a child that can contain the seven spirits. Unfortunately, Walker’s dry characterization makes the various players feel like mere pawns in the epic plot.
A tantalizing series opener that leaves little room for character development.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3278-8
Page Count: 294
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2019
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 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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