by Leigh Ann Edwards ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2015
There’s not a dull moment for this fantasy’s protagonist—no matter whose daughter she is.
A young woman must prove her noble lineage in order to break a curse in the second installment of Edwards’ (The Farrier’s Daughter, 2014) fantasy/romance series.
After fleeing Castle O’Brien, Alainn wanders the streets of Galway. Though she’s secretly pregnant, openly brokenhearted, and wholly uncertain about what to do next, she’s convinced that she had to leave her lover, Killian, so he could fulfill his destiny to become a great leader. But Killian convinces her to come home and marry him despite the fact that he’s betrothed to another woman—a suitably upper-class and surprisingly likable Scottish lass. Back at Castle O’Brien, Killian’s uncle, the clan’s malevolent and all-powerful chief, forbids a union between his nephew and Alainn. He also knows about her supernatural powers, which must be protected from the grasp of dark spirits, but he promises to leave her alone if she marries another man. As their respective wedding days approach, Alainn and Killian, both hotheaded and sharp-tongued, spar over a misunderstanding. Meanwhile, her friends soon notice that she’s expecting a child. Lady Siobhan, Killian’s kindly aunt, also realizes that Alainn has an uncanny resemblance to the members of her own noble family. Despite the young heroine’s many positive qualities, including unparalleled beauty, intellect, and magical powers including mind-reading and controlling the weather, Edwards shows that she’s also driven by passion rather than logic. This tendency makes Alainn rather slow to comprehend solutions to her problems, such as a curse that’s plagued the O’Brien family for decades. As a result, readers will likely see where the story is going long before its protagonist does, but it’s an action-packed page-turner nonetheless. Alainn and Killian’s sexy romance, as described here, is worth fighting for, even if their dialogue is often over-the-top; for example, while admiring a scenic view, she tells him, in all seriousness, “I have never beheld such an astounding, impressive sight. Apart from seeing you unclothed, of course.” Although it’s set in Ireland during its tumultuous 16th century, this book is more of a romance than a historical. It touches on elements such as Henry VIII and his wives and the impending British conquest, but it does so only in passing.
There’s not a dull moment for this fantasy’s protagonist—no matter whose daughter she is.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1460208731
Page Count: 200
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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