Where Pulley’s first novel sparkled with the ingenuity of spinning gears, her second offers a slower, sadder meditation on...
Pulley’s (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, 2015) second novel demonstrates that the imagination she showed in her impressive debut was no fluke.
The story opens in 1859, with the narrator, Merrick Tremayne, morosely nursing an injured leg at his decrepit family estate in Cornwall. Merrick used to smuggle opium into Hong Kong for the East India Company until an explosion a few years ago cost him his health and job. Botany and exotic travel run in the family: his grandfather and father both spent years in Peru, combing the Andes for botanical valuables such as orchids and frost-resistant coffee. Now the company wants to send Merrick to his ancestors’ old stomping grounds, hiring him to break the Peruvian quinine monopoly by smuggling out cuttings from cinchona trees, the source of the antimalarial medicine. Is Merrick well enough to hike the Andes? Pulley understands her genre—swashbuckling costume fantasy—but she deals in surprises, not clichés. An exploding tree, a mysterious moving statue, and a visit from an old friend help make up Merrick’s mind, propelling him across the ocean to a strange world of thin air, volcanic glass, and floating cities, where descendants of the Incas keep magical secrets. Strictly speaking, this is a prequel—a few paragraphs and a character or two tie this novel to Pulley’s masterful debut—but the two books have very different atmospheres.
Where Pulley’s first novel sparkled with the ingenuity of spinning gears, her second offers a slower, sadder meditation on love, trust, and the passage of time.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-967-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Scalzi continues to be almost insufferably good at his brand of fun but think-y sci-fi adventure.
In the first of a new series, brutal politics and pitiless physics threaten an interstellar empire built on trade.
The Interdependency is a group of barren planets and space stations ruled by mercantile trading houses and linked by the Flow, an extradimensional mode of travel. Occasional shifts in the Flow have cut off the Interdependency’s connection to some planets (including Earth), but it's remained relatively stable...until now. Count Claremont, a physicist stationed on the remote planet of End, has determined that the Interdependency will soon lose access to the Flow completely. Once that happens, every member of the Interdependency will be cut off from all the others by impassible light-years of distance, and a delicate web of commerce and survival will dissolve. Claremont sends his son to the Interdependency’s ruler, the Emperox Attavio IV, to share their findings before the Flow routes disappear. But Attavio IV is dying, and his daughter, Cardenia Wu-Patrick, was never intended to assume the throne. The reluctant new emperox is immediately confronted with assassination attempts and the ruthless machinations of the ambitious House of Nohamapetan, whose members seem to have their own knowledge of the radical change in the Flow. Readers might wonder whether Scalzi can write another space opera that shares the elements that made his Old Man’s War series (The End of All Things, 2015, etc.) so popular but be sufficiently different to feel fresh. Both include political plotting, plenty of snark, puzzle-solving, and a healthy dose of action, but there’s just enough here that’s new for this to avoid becoming a retread. There’s nothing groundbreaking, but you’ll still want to find out what happens next.
Scalzi continues to be almost insufferably good at his brand of fun but think-y sci-fi adventure.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8888-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine addition to a deservedly well-loved body of work.
All your old T-shirts and bumper stickers inscribed “Frodo Lives” may have to be replaced.
Old Hobbits do die hard—but there are none even born yet in this reconstructed tale of Middle Earth during the Elder Days (i.e., thousands of years prior to events immortalized in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy). Begun in 1918, revised several times, never published (though a capsule version of its narrative appears as a chapter in the posthumously published volume The Silmarillion), this appealing yarn is very nearly vintage Tolkien. To be sure, Middle Earth is under siege early in its history. The reigning villain is Dark Lord Morgoth (Sauron is merely one of his lieutenants), a demonic sort who rules a huge northern fortress ringed by mountains and destroys his enemies through the focused power of his malevolent will—more often than not incarnated in the figure of Glaurung, an exceedingly nasty “dragon of fire.” Their vengeful energies seek out two inordinately plucky youngsters—stalwart Túrin and his beautiful sister Nienor—who share the curse pronounced on their father Húrin, an intrepid Elfin warrior who had brazenly defied Morgoth. The episodic narrative takes off when Húrin leaves his sister and their mother Morwen (a veritable Penelope patiently awaiting her Ulysses’s return) to undertake a series of adventures that involve him with a brawling band of outlaws, the memorable Battle of Unnumbered Tears against what seem innumerable hordes of invading Orcs—remember them?), a duplicitous dwarf who offers the “shelter” of his underground stronghold and a terrific climactic encounter with the…uh, inflamed Glaurung. Strong echoes of the Finnish epic Kalevala, the tales of Robin Hood, Homeric epic and the matter of Wagnerian opera charge the text with complexity as well as vigor. And introductory and textual notes provided by the volume’s editor, Tolkien’s son Christopher, add welcome clarification.
A fine addition to a deservedly well-loved body of work.Pub Date: April 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-89464-2
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
SEEN & HEARD
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