A reader gets lost in a book, literally, in Ford’s (Zoey Avenger, 2014, etc.) fantasy romance.
Meet Naia, a self-described “introverted hermit” who prefers the company of fictional characters to real people—at least in theory. After her fiancé dumps her for another woman, Naia takes solace in her favorite author’s newest book, an unfinished adventure starring the Shadow Knight, a sexy, ruthless warrior on a mission to strike down 10 kingdoms and a 1,000-year curse in the warring lands of Black Moon Draw. After a night of reading and lots of wine, Naia awakens trapped in those very lands. There, the Shadow Knight insists that she is his battle-witch, a revered magical woman who can determine and influence the outcomes of battles. But Naia doesn’t know how to invoke her magic, nor does she believe this land is even real. Is it a dream? And if not, how can she return home? Gradually, Naia realizes that this adventure is her chance to start over, to shed her meek former self and become a hero—if she can overcome self-doubt and kick-start her magic. In the midst of all this, there’s a “dangerous attraction” between her and the mysterious, oh-so-manly Shadow Knight, who might not be such a bad guy after all. Though the end of this story is unsurprising, the route there is well-executed. Ford has created an exciting, fast-paced tale and a relatable, flawed character whose reactions to her circumstances are genuine and comical. Alas, the juicy sexual tension between Naia and the knight builds and builds but peaks with a vague, incomplete sex scene. Ford also explores the relationship between a writer and her readers: Naia has an ongoing one-sided discussion with LF, the author of the book she’s been pulled into. She wonders about LF’s choices, predicts what will happen next and even mocks spelling errors. The latter is a bit ironic, as Ford has missed a few typos and misspellings herself.
Bibliophiles may envy the protagonist in this fun, if predictable, story within a story.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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