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 breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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