A fantasy series starter that hardly scratches the surface, but its vivid descriptions and remarkable characters will have...
Sprites find themselves in mortal danger when connections between parallel worlds start to wither in Bates’ debut fantasy novel.
Years after being exiled for carrying a dormant but potentially deadly illness, Helia returns to the Sprite world of Forestlight. Her fellow Sprites are understandably worried about the weakened boundary between worlds called the Thinness. Daimanland, a world populated by large, menacing creatures, is bleeding into Forestlight, and the Interfaces (or gateways) may soon be big enough for the daiman to pass through. Helia has the ability to see glimpses of the other worlds and to sense where the boundaries are. She searches the humana world in order to help a special humana, Einion Morgan Alban, who has the power to strengthen the Thinness by closing Interfaces. Sea Sprites Yalara Narika and Rasania, meanwhile, are nearly overwhelmed by a blue haze, which may be the cause of devastation they witness later in Oceanlight. The novel lyrically details innumerable elements of the Sprite worlds, from the Sea Sprites’ many rituals to Einion’s travels into other realms and times. Even the darker parts of the story sound poetic; as Yalara and Rasania stare at the aftermath of destruction, for example, the ocean sparkles “with the glint of the rising sun.” Bates expertly blends the fantastical aspects with more true-to-life particulars: Einion is afflicted with hemophilia, for example, but the symptoms largely vanish when he crosses through an Interface. However, the book sometimes feels more like an introduction to a series than its own distinct story. For instance, the villain Fimafeng, a daiman-Sprite hybrid who can take human form, is dropped from the narrative too soon. There’s also no closure for any of the subplots, and Oceanlight doesn’t play a big role in the main plot’s calamity, despite the fact that it’s name-checked in the book’s subtitle. Overall, the novel gives the impression that a lengthier story was cut short—a notion supported by glossary-appendices that feature a few terms that never appear, including, disappointingly, “Bear-cat.”
A fantasy series starter that hardly scratches the surface, but its vivid descriptions and remarkable characters will have readers hunting for the next installment.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0993190520
Page Count: 444
Publisher: NR Bates Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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