An elegiac and celebratory fantasy.
Clark (The Royal Fables, 2016, etc.) offers a middle-grade fairy tale about two people hindered by a sorcerer’s spells.
To celebrate Princess Brooke’s 12th birthday, the king and queen give her a bedroom containing loads of flowers and an apple tree sapling. It also has a ceiling with an open skylight. However, when Brooke steps beneath it, she briefly disappears, then reappears beside her parents. It’s revealed that she’s not allowed to go outside because of a spell that a sorcerer, Beauregard, created to punish the queen. The next morning, Brooke wakes to find a creature perched in her small tree—“a snow-white Parakeet with golden feathers on its head.” She’s further surprised to learn that the bird speaks; his name, he says, is Prince Benjamin Mordecai Higginbotham. He’s also under a spell, and Brooke is the first person to understand him. They become fast friends, but then the princess comes down with a horrible fever. She dreams of being a bird herself, battling her way through the flora and fauna of an evil forest. Later, the princess and parakeet decide to do something about the spells holding them back—and to face the sorcerer who meddled in their lives. In this elegant fantasy, Clark presents characters who cope gracefully with affliction and enjoy life on their own terms. Along the way, the story discusses various forms of meditation, including the king’s, which involves “taking the time to figure out how things went together, looking at things from every angle.” It also offers intriguing details, such as the idea that parakeets “see the world slightly more enhanced than humans, more colorfully.” In the book’s first half, Clark delivers an enjoyably wandering narrative, following on Benjamin’s notion about stories: “when a character veers away from the plot....It’s as if I’ve been given a glimpse of them off the page, sharing something private.” Later, the narrative gallops down a more traditional fantasy path, even confronting the horrors of war. An afterword tells of the late Brooke Hester, the young girl who provided the inspiration for the tale, which gives the happy ending a bittersweet flavor.
An elegiac and celebratory fantasy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9910345-7-4
Page Count: 265
Publisher: BlahBlahBlah Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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