Imagination aplenty, but this rousing animal tale needs some refinement.
A red panda shaman confronts a villainous brown bear and his clan with the help of new friends and elementals from the spirit realm in this debut YA fantasy novel.
Bears populate a Far East-like world of the past in this series opener. At its center is Saraynea, an orphaned female red panda. An untrained shaman, she has the ability to manipulate the elements of fire, earth, air, and water. Saraynea is relentlessly pursued through forests and icy mountains by an evil clan led by brown bear Darkstorm, another shaman, who wants to use her as a means to harness and corrupt the power of magical beings in and outside of the spirit realm. Journeying toward her final confrontation with Darkstorm, Saraynea accumulates a cadre of female friends to help: a shy monk, a fierce warrior, a hunter, a mage and her sister, and a turncoat “shadow priestess” named Kheiryn. The priestess has a potent bond of “dark magic, so strong that shadow energy” emits from her back, which she keeps “in the form of black wings.” In addition, Saraynea’s “guardian spirit” turns out to be a formidable lion, whose jaws can shatter a warrior’s blade. The inventive story clearly reflects the author’s stated influences (zoology, anime, and video games), showing the female characters’ insecurities and growing closeness—scenes depicting the latter deliver a good deal of the book’s charm—and offering numerous fierce battles, lavishly detailed with martial arts action, arrows, swords, and magic. The bear characters (clad in robes, armor, and other garb) are believable in both their human attributes and their beastly qualities (paws, fangs, fur). But flaws in execution detract from the vivid world of Pluchino’s creation. Errors include a confusion of pronouns, repeated use of the same word within a single paragraph (“Fear rushed….The rush of thoughts….She rushed”), awkward phrasing, and run-on sentences (“Achamaru was happy to see her starting to feel better since they found her while Ayumei excitedly listened to Saraynea’s stories of how she would play with the spirits when she was a cub as well as when she met her spirit guardian”). Abrupt time shifts, too, undermine urgency and consistency. But the ending’s lighthearted resolution, setting up the bear friends for romance and adventures to come, is unexpectedly touching.
Imagination aplenty, but this rousing animal tale needs some refinement.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5190-2842-6
Page Count: 395
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 20, 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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
