A fantasy that offers strong themes and worldbuilding but lacks rich character details.
In a magical city in Italy, three royal brothers struggle with their desires and the roles destined for them at birth.
In this novel, Antonio, Matteo, and Claudio are sons of the Duca, ruler of Panduri—a town isolated from “Outside” (the real world)—where magic is prevalent and all natives are born with a special power. For instance, Antonio’s fiddle can call plants from the ground; Matteo’s poetry has similar potency; and Claudio’s talent involves singing. Their noble blood means the course of their lives has been set from birth, as with all royal sons of Panduri: “The First is Heir….Second is Protector….Third sons are Panduri’s priests, her Gentle Guardians.” But Antonio, the eldest son, rebels against his assigned role—he doesn’t want to stay in the capital plotting the star charts as the Heir. Instead, he usurps Matteo’s job as Protector, heading to Panduri’s border with its enemy town Careri. Matteo fumes at home—until Antonio mysteriously dies, and Panduri’s Deep Lore is thrown into upheaval. Matteo and Claudio are left to pick up the pieces; they’ll uncover family secrets that will set all of Panduri on a new course. There’s a lot to like about Tarquini’s (The Infinite Now, 2017, etc.) Italian-inflected fantasy story, starting with her often lyrical prose: “Poppies leapt from the soil, cosmos orbited the boxwood, laurels leafed the crown flowers, and silverbells tinkled a carillon.” Themes of family and fate are always at the forefront, and the magical talents of Panduri’s people have the dreamlike truth of a fairy tale. But while the author paints a captivating big picture, her small-scale character development remains superficial. Although Antonio, Matteo, and Claudio trade off passages of first-person narration, the voice doesn’t change. Minor characters, of which there are many, have purposes rather than personalities, and it’s difficult to keep track of them because there’s little here to emotionally engage with. The few female characters have little to do besides serving as sex objects or bearing lots of children.
A fantasy that offers strong themes and worldbuilding but lacks rich character details.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-69-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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