An impressive and captivating start to a new series offering Arthurian adventures.
A historical novel details the valorous fifth-century exploits of King Arthur’s uncle.
Early in the fifth century, during the twilight of the Roman Empire, 14-year-old Merlin attends the funeral of an infant named Theodosius in Barcelona. The child was to be the heir of King Adaulphus and Princess Placidia, and yet because Adaulphus is an Arian who helped sack Rome, there are those who reproach his offspring. Conspirators have switched the child, sending the Roman scion to be raised secretly in Britain, at the hands of the ruler Vortimer. In payment for escorting the child (now named Ambrosius) to Britain, Merlin receives an estate in Gallic Aureliani from Lord Grallon. Instead of settling down, Merlin travels the world, learning languages and the fighting arts. Ambrosius, meanwhile, grows into a willful but kind young man. Merlin returns home after 14 years and finds Ambrosius safe among those considered family (including the lovely Ahès, who adores him like a son). When one of the original conspirators, Bishop Germanus, stops by the family’s villa on the way to Britain—to reestablish Christian orthodoxy in the face of heresy—Merlin joins him as an interpreter. Ambrosius goes too, and begins his rapid metamorphosis from restless teenager to inspiring leader of men. Mintz (Memoir of the Masses, 2006) organizes a grand cache of myths and historical information to open a new series called Arthurian Tales. The story of Ambrosius, King Arthur’s uncle, proves an epic in its own right, filled with battles during which “the grass drank itself red,” and chivalrous wisdom, as in the line “Good deeds made a person noble, not lands or titles.” Mintz also whets the audience’s appetite for fifth-century history, with the bulk of his plot including the taming of the Saxon and Irish heathens. Each hint of the Camelot to come is thrilling, as when Merlin conceives the Round Table, at which “all men are equal.” With Merlin narrating, readers new to the historical fiction genre will find his clear (and occasionally sarcastic) voice great illumination in a murkily recorded era.
An impressive and captivating start to a new series offering Arthurian adventures.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9717828-5-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Erie Harbor Productions
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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