Occasionally ham-fisted, but good fun overall.
Someone or something is chomping on the good burgers of Bamberg, and it’s up to executioner-turned-detective Jakob Kuisl to figure out the whys and wherefores.
Being a hangman has some bennies, including, in the fraught era of counterreformation and inquisition, plenty of job security. Yet Jakob has been ticked off at the good citizens of Schongau ever since his pop “died in great agony” in a cold winter that saw the 1 percent comfortably bundled in furs and the great masses dying of hunger and frostbite. So what’s a self-respecting Bavarian to do? Head for a cathedral city for beer and solace, of course. In the company of daughter Magdalena and occasionally hapless son-in-law Simon (“If you can read books,” growls Jakob, “why can’t you read people?”), Jakob thus makes for Bamberg, where much is amiss. In this latest installment in the Hangman’s Daughter series, bestselling German writer Pötzsch (The Beggar King, 2013, etc.) is not always well-served by an off-handedness that sometimes comes off like Dick Shawn in The Producers (“Maybe he has the plague….That’s going around now”). Still, the setup is delicious: in a time of maddening superstition and general ineptitude (“These stupid drunks would probably get stuck even in a dry riverbed”), some party unknown is adding to the chaos by sinking blades or perhaps fangs and claws into the necks of the unsuspecting Bambergers, and it’s a grand entertainment to watch Jakob and associates go all CSI on the proceedings and sniff, deduce, and otherwise reason toward a solution that involves plenty of red herrings—or red simians, anyway. Fans of catacombs and secret underground cities will thrill at Jakob’s discoveries, and along the way Pötzsch turns in some quietly thoughtful moments that aren’t gooey with sentiment: “As a hangman’s daughter,” he writes to lovely effect, “Magdalena knew all too well how it felt when people looked away when they saw you and secretly crossed themselves.”
Occasionally ham-fisted, but good fun overall.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-61094-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.
Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.
The world’s not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call it Romeo and Juliet for the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text, The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, “She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it.” Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as “the man in the grey suit”? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise of teenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia’s magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53463-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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