Despite taking an entire book to get to the Collegium, Sauvain’s ensemble of unique characters enduring precarious...
In Sauvain’s epic fantasy, an aging sorcerer recruits three teenagers to study at the Collegium Sorcerorum; on their way, they’ll face thrilling adventures, romantic encounters and life lessons.
Set in the mysterious Dark Ages, the novel begins with an eccentric, mule-riding vagabond successfully luring 14-year-old Thaddeus from his parents’ home in Beewicke. The nearly 1,000-year-old sorcerer, Master Silvestrus (reminiscent of Dumbledore), recruits Thaddeus of Beewicke, Anders of Brightfield and Rolland of Fountaindale—a prominent thief—as his three apprentices. They are to travel to the Collegium, learn the art of sorcery and play their part in fulfilling an age-old prophecy. Sauvain’s detail-rich paragraphs and astute sense of character development are comparable to the Harry Potter series. Here, however, sorcery is more experimental and requires one to believe and have been intimate with a beloved. While Thaddeus is the clear-cut protagonist, the characters of Rolland, Anders and Asullus are arguably more compelling and memorable. Asullus, the talking mule, is hilarious and loyal to a fault. Anders, having studied under numerous scholars, is the intelligent one. Rolland, an orphan who grew up on the streets and steals for survival, quickly develops an entertaining love/hate relationship with Asullus. Together, Master Silvestrus and company tackle adventures featuring robbers, ogres, deceptive butterflies, spirits, fairies, elves, talking trees, demons, a peculiar dog named Bellis, the cursed Cin army of cowards and more. Although splendid characterizations, engaging plot twists and humorous dialogues are the pillars of Sauvain’s narrative, a number of characters seem rushed and far too temporary; for example, Ethne enters the novel early as Thaddeus’ love interest, but there’s no sign of her in the remaining 548 pages. Sean Bodley’s illustrations and maps add depth to the setting, the extensive glossary allows readers to understand Lingua Imperatoria and the section on “Dramatis Personae” is instrumental in explaining who each character is and the role he plays.
Despite taking an entire book to get to the Collegium, Sauvain’s ensemble of unique characters enduring precarious situations delivers great fun and anticipation for the ensuing books in the saga.Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615503295
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Louis Sauvain
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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