A fast-paced series opener that will make readers eager to know Chavali’s next move.
Kort (A Curse of Memories, 2017, etc.) and French (Ghost Is the New Normal, 2017, etc.) join forces to launch a fantasy series about a woman’s encounter with a highly unusual cabal.
In the land of Tilzam, the Blaukenev clan travels from country to country by wagon. Chavali is the clan Seer—marked by a pink feather sprouting from her forehead—who can know somebody’s thoughts at a touch. During carnivals, she reads customer fortunes in her tent, though the “parade of idiots and twits” with pedestrian problems irks her. Even worse, her bodyguard, Keino, harbors obsessive thoughts about her that bleed into her mind whenever they touch. One day, three men on horseback ask to travel with the caravan. Chavali learns that their names are Teryk, Eliot, and Colby. Each wears a signet ring on his middle finger, and they ask her numerous questions about the clan. After parting ways with the horsemen, the Blaukenev travel west, and one night, after Chavali finishes her readings, an insistent final customer offers to pay double to see her. He has the intense gaze of a predator and tells her, “The Order of the Strong Arm has come for you, Chavali.” This confrontation soon leads her to join a group of resurrected individuals with a very specific mission. In this brooding series opener, Kort and French insightfully explore staple fantasy elements, such as telepathy and resurrection, to luminous effect. Regarding the possibility of having a child, for example, Chavali wonders, “would she know the moment it began to form thoughts and be bombarded with them, unable to prevent it from driving her mad...until it was born?” Characters like Keino and Pasha, Chavali’s younger teenage sister, are sharply rendered and will draw readers deeply into their nomadic world. Events that occur midway through the narrative, however, prove that Kort and French are daring storytellers who aren’t afraid to yank the rug from beneath the audience’s feet. The book’s second half thoughtfully deals with the topic of revenge, and no character ever takes another’s life callously.
A fast-paced series opener that will make readers eager to know Chavali’s next move.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9891210-9-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Tangled Sky Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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