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 best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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