A gift to the author’s fans and a compelling introduction to her supernatural universe for new readers.
In this first book of the Oracle fantasy series, a young woman ages out of a foster-care system only to learn she’s a being of great magical potential.
An orphan from birth, Rochelle Saintpaul has just turned 19. She’s now allowed to leave her Vancouver Residence home and follow her bliss in an RV. Her online business of selling charcoal drawings is successful, but her unknown psychotic disorder (plaguing her since she was 13) produces seizures and visions. The visions—featuring a tall man in a black suit and a blonde woman wielding a sparkling green knife—become the subjects of her drawings. While saying goodbye to her social worker, Rochelle receives a jewelry box that belonged to her mother, who died in a car accident. Inside are a gold necklace and “an antique white rock.” Rochelle then buys her RV and heads for Washington state, just as a scraggly local named Hoyt tries once more to befriend her. No sooner does she find a roadside diner across the border than someone asks her, “What are you?...A witch?” The buff, charismatic stranger, named Beau Jamison, notes her tattoo sleeves and alluring eyes. After buying her some pie, Beau wins Rochelle over and returns with her to the RV. Expanding the world of her Dowser series, Doidge (Catching Echoes, 2016, etc.) merges romance, carnality, and supernatural fantasy to lush effect. Her characterization of Rochelle as someone who’s earned her place in the world is encapsulated by the line “My entire life had been dictated by other people’s tragedies and shortcomings, but now I had a future that was just mine.” Later, Doidge hints at the bond forming between her protagonists when Beau “tucked my hair behind my ear...then caressed down my neck and across my collarbone,” only to moments later shove readers off an erotic cliff. The fantasy elements, including shape-shifters, sorcerers, and Rochelle’s connection to them all, proceed more gradually. The volume ends with a compromise—made for love—that promises dire consequences later in the series.
A gift to the author’s fans and a compelling introduction to her supernatural universe for new readers.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-927850-16-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Old Man in the CrossWalk Productions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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