Youmans’s second Adantis offering hovers between novel and fairytale. Orphans Ingledove and Lang live in the city, refugees from a pastoral paradise flooded for electricity during WWII. When Lang has a nightmare, the children’s folksy and uncanny nurse sends them on a strange journey. She tells Lang to beware of snakes, but the boy scoffs at her superstition. Yet while the children wander the backwoods, he’s seduced by a snakelike succubus who leaves him near death. It’s up to Ingledove to save her brother, and she brings him deep into the wild to meet an Adantan Witchmaster. The children’s mother, she learns, was from Adantis—a tribe of Celtic-Cherokee crosses inhabiting magical Appalachia. Together with the young Witchmaster, Ingledove quests into the land of the Little People to defeat Lang’s monstrous seducer. Ingledove’s magical journey, lovingly enriched by Celtic and Cherokee mythology, ends too suddenly and with too little personal growth for conventional fiction. But the intricate and unorthodox mythos is fascinating; Ingledove’s story, though set in the 20th century, is clearly folklore. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: May 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-33599-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
Searching for the wandering soul of her beloved sister, Mitsuko enlists the aid of a host of supernatural friends in this colorful fantasy, set in 12th-century Japan. As a member of an eminent clan, Mitsuko has spent her first 13 years in a courtly, constricted world. When part of her family is set upon, first by warrior monks who leave her new brother-in-law Yugiri dead and his wife (her sister Amaiko) dazed and numb, then by an ambitious local lord with marriageable sons, Mitsuko finds the courage to flee into the forest—and to accept the company of Goranu, a mischievous, immortal shape-changer. Sure that Amaiko's soul has followed Yugiri's into the land of the dead, she sets out to reclaim it, sped on her way by several Buddhist and Shinto spirits, some kind, some dangerous. Although elaborate courtesies, a round of poetry parties, and stylized conversation slow the beginning, Mitsuko will win readers over with her determination and the forthright way she faces the powers of heaven and hell. Less intense than Katharine Paterson's Of Nightingales That Weep (1974), and even whimsical at times, the story and its tricks, chases, sudden changes of scene, and its large cast of humans and nonhumans, will appeal to fans of Lensey Namioka's samurai tales. The account ends with a poignant, romantic twist: Goranu offers to end his life so he can come back as a mortal and marry her. A readable, engagingly semiserious adventure. (glossary) (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-201392-X
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
A moiled, disappointingly passionless view of a people burdened by grief and fear after years of unchecked violence. Told that his aunt Petrona is ill, Juan, 17, leaves his family in Bogot† for Punta Verde, her country estate, where he learns that it's not sickness, but loneliness and fear that have prompted her request for company. Fear of what? Despite plenty of hints, Juan repeatedly needs to have it spelled out: Military troops and guerilla forces have become interchangeable in their terrorist tactics and lack of discipline, and the death toll has been rising almost daily. Juan meets a confusingly large number of campesinos, and Jenkins (Celebrating the Hero, 1993, etc.) shields him, and readers, from any direct experience with soldiers or mayhem—it's all secondhand or offstage. Several subplots are shoehorned in: Petrona reveals that she's actually his grandmother; and while revelations about his father's past are changing Juan from an archetypally sullen teen to a loving son, he meets and falls for Chia, a librarian who, after plenty of clumsy foreshadowing, is killed by a bomb. There is little sense of place and no reason given for the violence. Also missing is the terrifying immediacy of Frances Temple's A Taste Of Salt (1992) and, as is found in Louise Moeri's The Forty-Third War (1989), a clear vision of a society in which warfare is endemic. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-67538-8
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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