A classical, if uneven, fantasy story in which characters embrace their best selves, virtue triumphs, and selfless love...
A prince and princess learn the value of love and compassion.
In his fantasy novel, Jannetta (Ella-Maria Goes to Heaven, 2013, etc.) introduces Melkio and Elliza, heirs to the kingdoms of South and North Cordiva. Although the two kingdoms are rivals—Melkio’s father kills Elliza’s in the book’s opening pages—the two royals form an immediate bond when they meet as children and later connect as young adults. Melkio, tired of being a disappointment to his father, Esham, runs away and encounters Elliza, who poses as his servant when they find themselves guests of a treacherous noble who tries to usurp Esham’s crown. With Elliza’s help, Melkio defeats the rebellion and learns to forgive his father, and the young couple marry. The story’s focus then shifts to Elliza’s sister Abby, suddenly struck by an unexplained illness and bitter about the limitations it brings to her life. She gradually finds happiness through helping others, including Pastole, son of the traitorous noble and a prisoner in her castle. Elliza and Melkio join Abby and Pastole in a quest for a supernatural cure for Abby’s illness, traveling to an underworld guarded by magical creatures and proving their worthiness through a series of sacrifices. Fans of swordfights and castles will find plenty of both in the tale, along with sweeping pronouncements like “In that singular moment meant for revenge, I instead found clarity.” The writing is bumpy, with both clever turns of phrase (“your generosity will be like waves crashing on the beach”), including well-executed, punlike chapter titles, and clumsy modern lines delivered by quasi-medieval characters (“before I go in there with my guys”). The book is part of the mainstream fantasy tradition, with its world made up of royalty, peasants, and rural communities, and the outcome of clashes between good and evil is predictable. The supernatural element is somewhat incongruous, as it appears only in brief references in the work’s first half, but effectively plays its role in the tale’s resolution.
A classical, if uneven, fantasy story in which characters embrace their best selves, virtue triumphs, and selfless love overcomes all barriers.Pub Date: June 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5301-4585-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Harry Potter–like threads spun into a fresh, enjoyable mix of magic and mystery.
A teenage orphan enters a curious school and encounters mysteries and dangerous secrets in this first installment of a debut YA fantasy series.
Life in Croswald is about to change for 16-year-old orphan Ivy, a lowly castle maid in charge of the kitchen “scaldrons,” oven-heating, fire-breathing dragons. Fleeing the castle after a messy scaldron mishap, Ivy hops a strange conveyance that transports her to a school for potential quill-wielding, spell-casting “scrivenists.” (The author’s creative language—students are “sqwinches,” and “hairies” are lanterns housing fairies with luminous hair—is one of the book’s pleasures.) Learning that there is more to her gift for sketching than she realized, Ivy studies spells and the magical properties of inks and quills, but strange things keep happening. Why is an old scrivenist, long thought dead, working in secret? Why is the head of the oddly familiar school moving paintings to the “Forgetting Room” so that no one will remember they existed? How can Ivy get a look at a certain journal stored there, and what does it have to do with her recurrent dream? And why has Ivy drawn the interest of the Dark Queen of Croswald and her truly fearsome Cloaked Brood? The intrigue is layered with such whimsical inventions as one school lunchroom run by ghostly bad cooks and another by a jester who is best avoided, scrivenists who end their lives as tomes in a library, and small houses pulled by a gargantuan flying beast with its own weather system. Yes, there are many Harry Potter–ish elements: a school for young wand-wielders, quirky shops dealing in enchanted student supplies, eccentric characters, spells gone wrong, an evil pursuer. But Night’s blend of magic, danger, and suspense (and a touch of steampunk) is a well-realized, fresh fantasy world all its own, and Ivy is an appealing protagonist of relatable complexity. A few bobbles: Ivy seems to go without food for long stretches; the use of “effected” rather than “affected”; a professor who is both standing and perched on a chair.
Harry Potter–like threads spun into a fresh, enjoyable mix of magic and mystery.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9969486-5-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Stories Untold Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this riveting futuristic novel, Spaz, a teenage boy with epilepsy, makes a dangerous journey in the company of an old man and a young boy. The old man, Ryter, one of the few people remaining who can read and write, has dedicated his life to recording stories. Ryter feels a kinship with Spaz, who unlike his contemporaries has a strong memory; because of his epilepsy, Spaz cannot use the mind probes that deliver entertainment straight to the brain and rot it in the process. Nearly everyone around him uses probes to escape their life of ruin and poverty, the result of an earthquake that devastated the world decades earlier. Only the “proovs,” genetically improved people, have grass, trees, and blue skies in their aptly named Eden, inaccessible to the “normals” in the Urb. When Spaz sets out to reach his dying younger sister, he and his companions must cross three treacherous zones ruled by powerful bosses. Moving from one peril to the next, they survive only with help from a proov woman. Enriched by Ryter’s allusions to nearly lost literature and full of intriguing, invented slang, the skillful writing paints two pictures of what the world could look like in the future—the burned-out Urb and the pristine Eden—then shows the limits and strengths of each. Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty (1993) has again created a compelling set of characters that engage the reader with their courage and kindness in a painful world that offers hope, if no happy endings. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-08758-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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