Familial strife initiates a fresh and lively clique of magic-wielding teens.
This debut middle-grade fantasy stars a boy whose true parentage hints at a magical destiny.
Ten years ago, Todd Selby missed his morning train at Waterloo Station in London. He also happened to save a woman who’d been jostled by rambunctious children from falling. Enter Grimble the goblin, who presented them with a swaddled baby. He told them to take the child east to Canterbury and settle there. The enchanted couple did so, and now the child is 11-year-old Jeremy Cutler. He has no idea that he’s an Everborn, from the magical kingdom of Averland. Nor does he realize that Harkkruin, the Dark Apprentice of Mordin, once again moves against the Everborn people. Only Jeremy’s neighbor Charles Gaper seems capable of preparing the boy for the challenges ahead. He places Jeremy on a special train to Coventry and into the care of Mr. and Mrs. Nockins, fellow Everborns. From his room in their home, he accesses a tunnel leading to the Fairwoods of Averland. He soon meets his mentor, Windermere Hawksley, who gives him the Seeson and Thyme Observation Deck of cards and informs him that his real parents await in the lost Castle of Airenel. In this novel, Faix unfurls a vibrant, complex tapestry reminiscent of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe. Adding emotional weight to the narrative is that it’s set during Halloween and then Christmas, holidays that Jeremy’s adoptive mother, Sharon, hasn’t had the heart to celebrate in the years since her own mother died. Her awakening from a depression coincides with the protagonist’s descent into the magical. Though Jeremy is 11, older teen readers should enjoy the detailed plot that involves a rash of kidnappings, time travel, and numerous inventive fantasy scenarios. One episode includes the pirate ship Polaris, which carries Jeremy upriver and through a forest lit by colorful fairyflies, where “the air tasted sweet and cool, with hints of peppermint and gingerbread.” This opening volume of a series also introduces fellow youthful adventurers Tripp Cunning, Ree Spinnler, and Ckyler Blewett, with whom our hero must prepare to face darker threats.
Familial strife initiates a fresh and lively clique of magic-wielding teens.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944715-24-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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