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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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