An entertaining series starter that will appeal to young readers craving more magical school stories.
In this debut fantasy set in Australia, three children with magical powers must locate a powerful amulet before their enemies do.
As babies, Alexandra, Jake and Kian were transported from their home world and brought to Earth, a world in which magic fades in the presence of adults. Raised in an orphanage, the three are adopted into different families by parents who are also from their home world; they’re magical creatures disguised as humans to guard the children. Each child is a royal heir and Stone Bearer chosen to wield the protective magic of one of the four kingdoms in their magical lands. But until they can find the lost Amulet of Hazar and a way to keep it safe from the evil Lord Paragon and his minion, Colt, the children can’t return to their true parents. Along with being enrolled in a private school, which others from their world also secretly attend, the three children train in magic and combat under the tutelage of their guardians. Overtones of Hogwarts are clear, including a playful equivalent of Diagon Alley that even mundane humans can visit and a multiple-choice quiz that sorts the children into four houses represented by mythical animals. But the story takes on too many perspectives—including those of the children, the adults and their nonmagical friends—and there are several holes that astute readers will notice. Why were the children not raised by their guardians in the first place rather than at an orphanage? Why is the green Stone Bearer’s identity hidden from the children (but not the readers)? And if the magical beings from the Land of Four Stones are able to pose as humans and infiltrate the school, why is this important quest being handed to the young Stone Bearers? Still, even with these issues, Farrugia creates an interesting world, and Alexandra in particular is a strong female lead determined to do what it takes to keep both Earth and the Land of Four Stones safe from Paragon’s plots.
An entertaining series starter that will appeal to young readers craving more magical school stories.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1452511511
Page Count: 180
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing...
The abrasive, vulnerable title character sometimes stands center stage, sometimes plays a supporting role in these 13 sharply observed dramas of small-town life from Strout (Abide with Me, 2006, etc.).
Olive Kitteridge certainly makes a formidable contrast with her gentle, quietly cheerful husband Henry from the moment we meet them both in “Pharmacy,” which introduces us to several other denizens of Crosby, Maine. Though she was a math teacher before she and Henry retired, she’s not exactly patient with shy young people—or anyone else. Yet she brusquely comforts suicidal Kevin Coulson in “Incoming Tide” with the news that her father, like Kevin’s mother, killed himself. And she does her best to help anorexic Nina in “Starving,” though Olive knows that the troubled girl is not the only person in Crosby hungry for love. Children disappoint, spouses are unfaithful and almost everyone is lonely at least some of the time in Strout’s rueful tales. The Kitteridges’ son Christopher marries, moves to California and divorces, but he doesn’t come home to the house his parents built for him, causing deep resentments to fester around the borders of Olive’s carefully tended garden. Tensions simmer in all the families here; even the genuinely loving couple in “Winter Concert” has a painful betrayal in its past. References to Iraq and 9/11 provide a somber context, but the real dangers here are personal: aging, the loss of love, the imminence of death. Nonetheless, Strout’s sensitive insights and luminous prose affirm life’s pleasures, as elderly, widowed Olive thinks, “It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”
A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6208-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
PERSPECTIVES
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.
A much-translated tale of plagues, priestly malfeasance, courtly love and the Seven Deadly Sins finds a satisfying new version in English.
The Decameron, as its Greek-derived name suggests, is a cycle of stories told over a period of 10 days by Florentines fleeing their city for the countryside in order to escape the devastating Black Death of 1348. Perched at the very point of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the author of those stories, Giovanni Boccaccio, was a narrative innovator: As translator Rebhorn notes in his long, circumstantial introduction, medieval readers were fond of grab bags of stories, but “there is no precedent in Italian literature for Boccaccio’s use of a frame narrative to unify his collection.” Boccaccio borrowed liberally from previously published anthologies, but as Rebhorn also shows, he added plenty of new twists and arranged his material to form a thematic arc: Day 1, for instance, centers on characters who got out of trouble thanks to their native wit, while Day 4 centers on the character flaws that keep people from getting what they want. What so many of his characters want, it happens, are things frowned upon in polite society, as his ribald tale of the poor cuckolded owner of a conveniently large barrel so richly shows. Rebhorn’s translation of Boccaccio’s sprawling narrative, accompanied by informative endnotes, is sometimes marked by odd shifts in levels of diction, often within the same sentence (“That’s when I felt the guy was going too far...and it seemed to me that I should tell you about it so that you could see how he rewards you for that unwavering fidelity of yours”); it is otherwise clear and idiomatic, however, and Rebhorn capably represents Boccaccio’s humor and sharp intelligence.
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06930-3
Page Count: 1264
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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