An engaging adventure, despite the lack of an ending and some characterization problems.
In this debut middle-grade fantasy novel, a boy unlocks a magical globe and enters a world where witches fight monsters.
Archibald Finch, almost 12 years old, has just moved from London with his family to the rambling, creepy Hertfordshire mansion that his father inherited. Searching for hidden Christmas presents, Archibald discovers a centuries-old globe that shows misshapen continents with peculiar creatures inhabiting them. Even weirder, the globe has an odd mechanism that emits a bright light in a flash of thunder—and then somehow absorbs Archibald within itself. Now in a strange new world called Lemurea, Archibald explores the land—encountering girls, magic, and monsters. The last are called Marodors, each a chimera of other beasts like “some botched experiment.” The magic is wielded by the (nearly) all-girl inhabitants, such as beautiful Faerydae, who finds Archibald and brings him to relative safety. There, the girls teach Archibald about Lemurea and “golems,” stones inscribed with runes and combined in different ways to fight Marodors. (This is puzzlingly far from the classic meaning of golem.) Meanwhile, Archibald’s sister, Hailee, nearly 14, searches for her lost brother. She too faces danger from a robber disguised as a priest, but she gains an ally in Oliver Doyle, the 15-year-old son of the shop owner she consults about the globe. Archibald makes an important discovery about Marodors, but a quest to visit the queen leads to some shocking news. His potentially world-changing ideas will have to wait; the saga is to be continued. In his series opener, Guyon offers an intelligently conceived portal tale with action and humor. Complex storytelling strands are deftly woven here, bringing in Leonardo da Vinci, orphanages, and psychological ideas about the nature of monster-making. Some readers may question the idea that it takes a boy barely any time at all to figure out the Marodor problem, which has eluded the world’s girls for hundreds of years. Archibald becomes a man in his 15-day odyssey, but the much-older (though young-looking) Faerydae still pouts like a child. The images by debut illustrator Kostich are complexly detailed and nicely show atmosphere.
An engaging adventure, despite the lack of an ending and some characterization problems.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-7325699-2-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2021
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
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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