A slim faux fantasy epic that doesn’t ultimately have much original to say.
A noble warrior attempts to make a better world in this satirical fantasy from Aubin (Fires of Ferndean, 2019, etc.).
A messenger arrives in Rufus’ village of Green Hole to inform everyone that there is now one true god—Ethyl—and that all men of fighting age must join the crusade against the doubting pagans. No one is all that convinced of the new religion, but peasants don’t have much say in such matters. Rufus the blacksmith is no different, and he marches off to war with his recognizable “ugly” sword that gives him his name. After defeating the enemy champion in single combat, the blacksmith is sent off to kill a dragon and collect a reward. He slays a deceitful noble and, in the process, acquires a wife and her land. From the position of power, Rufus is suddenly able to correct some of the injustices of the feudal system. When the king attacks Green Hole over an unpaid debt, Rufus simply relocates the villagers to a nearby kingdom. Serving a new, kind king, he attempts to bring peace and justice to a world more often categorized by theft and exploitation. But is such a thing even possible in a land riven by dragons, war, and mountains of customs paperwork? Aubin writes in mock-epic prose that summons the fantasy tradition: “The men reached Bayside just before sunset and found themselves seated at a round wooden table, their hunger satiated, their drink almost done. Robert stared wistfully into his ale, the attention of the beautiful ladies of Bayside all but ignored.” The story is light in tone, but despite some jokey names—Robert the Insane, Steve the Assassin—it isn’t all that funny. Its earnest belief in a more just society actually seems to echo the medieval romances that it chidingly references. The book is short, and the pacing is quick, but the story itself is a bit too skeletal and rushed to be truly immersive. It’s the type of novel that seems like it was probably a lot more fun to write than it is to actually read.
A slim faux fantasy epic that doesn’t ultimately have much original to say.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5485-6667-8
Page Count: 150
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2019
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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