McKillip’s hallmarks are charm and elegance, diminished here by busy, fussy plotting, lack of suspense and little...
More enchantments and wonders from McKillip (The Tower at Stony Wood, 2000, etc.), here displayed in a tale where almost everybody forlornly carries secrets and sorrows they cannot share.
Brenden Vetch carries his grief like a sack of stones as he wanders far and wide, learning about plants by literally becoming them. In the snows of distant Skrygard Mountain, he comes upon a strange group of ancient, charred stumps, clearly alive and compellingly magical but impervious to his talents. Then the tall, semi-legendary, 400-year-old wizard Od tells him to go to King Galin’s school of magic, where they have need of a gardener. At the school, Brenden meets unhappy teacher Yar Ayrwood, constrained by King Galin’s chronic mistrust of unknown magics and unable to entirely rely on his lover, Ceta Thiel, whose cousin, the wizard Valoren Greye, enforces the king’s rules. Sulys, Galin’s daughter, is engaged to marry Valoren but finds he won’t listen to her; Sulys works her own small magics with needle and thread, water and wax, inherited from her grandmother but not approved by the school. In the Twilight Quarter, meanwhile, the dazzling but mysterious magician Tyramin again takes up residence. Tyramin’s public face is that of his beautiful daughter, Mistral, who must pretend that her own potent magic is nothing but illusion and spectacle, because it lies outside the royal purview. Od, clearly orchestrating affairs, must prompt a wholesale reorganization of events into a somewhat less melancholic configuration.
McKillip’s hallmarks are charm and elegance, diminished here by busy, fussy plotting, lack of suspense and little expectation that the characters might solve their problems by their own efforts.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-441-01248-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
A fun, unusual contemporary fantasy that doesn’t skimp on violence.
An accident-prone teenage boy named Squib forms an unlikely friendship with a dragon living in a Louisiana bayou.
Squib Moreau can’t catch a break. His kindhearted single mother, Elodie, works long hours as a nurse, and when she’s not worrying about what her son is up to, she’s fighting off the advances of the local constable, Regence Hooke. Elodie and Squib both get the feeling that Hooke is something more dangerous than a sleazy cop, and they’re right: He’s murderous, corrupt, and out to take over the local drug-running business. When Squib sees something he shouldn’t late at night out on the water and Hooke goes after him with a grenade launcher, Squib suddenly finds himself being rescued by a dragon. The dragon in question, Vern (short for “Wyvern, Lord Highfire”), believes he is the last of his kind and lives in secret deep in the swamp. Vern holds a centuries-old grudge against the race that killed off his fellow dragons but finds himself in need of a helper, or “familiar.” Vern may be a dragon, but he has a taste for TV, vodka, Flashdance T-shirts, and all sorts of things he can’t get for himself. Vern reluctantly lets Squib work for him, and over time they develop a camaraderie. But when Hooke sees Vern for himself, he decides to use Squib to force the dragon to do some of his dirty work. Colfer’s best-known writing is geared toward young adults (The Fowl Twins, 2019, etc.), but between some of the gorier scenes and Hooke’s sinister inner monologue, you wouldn’t know it. He writes this book in a folksy Louisiana voice that drawls right off the page: “Squib was as jumpy as a cat in a doghouse traversing the river.” Vern’s taste for modern life (he’s on the Keto diet) is clever, and he is a prickly but lovable foil to the unholy terror that is Constable Hooke.
A fun, unusual contemporary fantasy that doesn’t skimp on violence.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293855-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
An overlong but imaginative entry in the revived Foundation series, with a talky opening, an intriguing middle, and an illogical fade-out. Councilman Golan Trevize, having opted for the formation of a galaxy-wide, totally empathic super-organism, Galaxia, is now having second thoughts—and his doubts focus on a possible threat from the long-lost planet Earth. So, supplied with clues by historian Janes Pelorat, and protected by the powerful Gaian woman, Bliss, Trevize begins his search. (The debate pro and con Galaxia continues, meanwhile, in tiresome detail.) In the novel's best section, they touch down on various planets, including the old Spacer world Solaria, where the hermaphroditic Solarians live in solipsistic splendor, totally isolated from each other on their vast robot-run estates, casually controlling energy by means of their enlarged brains. Finally, on Earth's Moon, Trevize encounters robot Daneel Olivaw, now 20,000 years old; Daneel, with his highly advanced brain and psychic powers, has secretly been guiding the development of Galaxia all along. And, in a total non sequitur, Trevize realizes that what he really fears—why Galaxia must be formed—is the threat of invasion by extra-galactic aliens. Dreadfully long-winded—would that the characters sometimes reply with a simple "yes" or "no"—and many longtime fans will prefer Daneel as a plain old robot-detective rather than a galactic super-brain. Yet, much here qualifies as vintage Asimov—Solaria has long been one of his finest creations—despite that disappointing, artificial finale.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1986
ISBN: 0553900943
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
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