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 tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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