A thoughtful, well-written, and exciting historical novel in an excellent series.
This latest series entry continues the tale of how a medieval king and an abbot helped to found Scotland.
In two previous books, Exile (2012) and Prophet (2013), de Fougerolles told the twin stories of future saint Columba and warrior Aedan mac Gabran, two friends and allies in a strife-torn world. As Columba worked to found a monastery on the island of Iona, Aedan forged new political and personal relationships that helped him rise to power. Now, in the spring of 574, Aedan has just been acclaimed king of Dal Riata, a region that roughly encompasses western Scotland and eastern Ireland. But to keep the throne, he must keep the peace, and because the two Dal Riatas haven’t been combined for more than 70 years, Aedan’s control of them is more nominal than actual. Nor can Columba rest easy, as he has a knack for making enemies. A crisis ensues when Baetan mac Cairell—the overking of Ulaid, the Scots’ ancestral homeland in Ireland—demands that Aedan acknowledge him as his leader. The kingdom as a whole must be unified, and soon, everything depends upon finding the Irish heir-apparent Fiachna Lurgan, who was sold into slavery as a boy. Aedan and Columba must mount a dangerous expedition to Ireland where, as an exile, Columba faces mortal danger. If they succeed, they’ll have a chance to bring stability to their benighted world. De Fougerolles, a medieval historian, again brings this complicated, rich world to vivid life. With its scenes of battle and conflict, the main story is stirringly intense, and the many levels of sixth-century culture are often surprising, such as the roving gangs of bards who threaten their hosts with vicious satires if they don’t provide fine food and lodging. Although the pages are thick with daunting, unfamiliar names and titles, de Fougerolles does provide a helpful list of characters, maps, and a glossary with pronunciations, among other supporting material. Several links to Arthurian legend add further interest to the story—most importantly, a growing social awareness that laws should protect the innocent. (A further volume is planned.)
A thoughtful, well-written, and exciting historical novel in an excellent series.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-12286-0
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Careswell Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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