A beautifully detailed fantasy about love, magic, and age that doesn’t quite reconcile its reality with the myths that...
In his first new novel in more than a decade, Beagle creates an intimate drama between the members of a family who are slowly blindsided by myth and magic spilling into their ordinary world.
Abe and Joanna are two halves of a comfortable couple who have been together for 22 years but continue to live apart. Abe is a retired history professor who lives on an island in the Puget Sound, writing a book about 14th-century European history and indulging a fondness for playing blues harmonica. Joanna is a flight attendant who lives in Seattle, stubbornly marching toward her own retirement and continually worrying about her daughter, Lily. Beagle (A Fine and Private Place, 2015, etc.) crafts a convincing portrait of mature happiness between personable characters who are imperfect, but lovingly familiar, and an idyllic take on the Puget Sound region. When the quiet rhythm of their lives is interrupted by the appearance of the extraordinary Lioness Lazos, a strange and strangely beautiful waitress who seems to bend people and nature around her, the reader might mourn the intrusion by enchantment. The most compelling parts of this novel are the people in it, who remain vividly distinct, compellingly ordinary, and utterly believable despite the encroaching magic. Moments between characters are described with details that fit exactly—“she thought she could hear his heart beating through the phone, as though they were resting after love”—and their creeping disappointments feel familiar to anyone who has ever been older than they wished. The fantastical elements build with a satisfying sense of reality becoming unmoored and emotions running high, but when they crash in at full force with revelations pinned on one of the most familiar of Greek myths, the story threatens to capsize and wobbles as it reaches the end.
A beautifully detailed fantasy about love, magic, and age that doesn’t quite reconcile its reality with the myths that inspire it.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61696-244-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0380977273
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962
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