Like much of McKillip’s work: gorgeous, evocative, and fragile.
Reissue of McKillip’s 1974 fantasy tale of lost innocence; widely praised, sometimes extravagantly so, it won the 1975 World Fantasy Award.
White-haired, black-eyed wizard Sybel lives alone on Eld Mountain with a collection of magical, sentient beasts—the Boar Cyrin, the Lyon Gules, the Falcon Ter, and so on—with whom she can converse telepathically. She and her forebears magically summoned the creatures, though her heart's desire to call the great white bird Liralen remains unfulfilled. Her bubble bursts when Coren of Sirle arrives claiming vague kinship and bearing a newborn baby, the son of his slain brother. Coren’s family is locked in an existential struggle with Drede, King of Eldwold, for control of the kingdom to which baby Tamlorn is heir. Reluctantly she accepts charge of the child and begins to experience the emotions she hitherto has never needed. Both Drede and Coren, it turns out, covet her beauty and her power, but Sybel refuses to take sides. Years pass. Tam, it emerges, is actually Drede’s son, so she returns him to the king. But then Drede makes a fatal mistake, leaving Sybel burning for a revenge that threatens to subvert her capacity for love. All this echoes many fantasy ideas without borrowing overmuch from any one, and it never turns derivative. The narrative is perfectly articulated, with a timeless quality accentuated by McKillip’s trademark crystal-filigree prose and undercurrents of subtle humor. On this level, then, it totally succeeds. But does it withstand closer inspection, as a great fantasy must? Well, Drede and Coren, while sympathetic and appealing (when they’re not being perverse or unpredictable), are two-dimensional—the animals have more personality. More crucially, Sybel remains incapable of introspection, unable to grasp that what she does to others is no different than what others do, or attempt to do, to her. The magic, too, is troublesome: it breeds true despite a human admixture in every generation and comes without agency, effort, learning, or downside.
Like much of McKillip’s work: gorgeous, evocative, and fragile.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61696-277-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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