Two siblings search for a magical flower that will rouse their sister from her mystical slumber.
One day while exploring a nearby forest, siblings Jochen, Natalie and Bärbel discover weird, wonderful black flowers. Beautiful and elegant, the black flowers also exude an aura of horrible evil. Cousin Thorsten, who is accompanying the siblings, relates the legend of Schoenboeck, a powerful magician who laid a curse on the flowers—anyone who approached them would fall into a never-ending sleep. The only way to lift the curse is by using the alabaster roses that Schoenboeck keeps inside his castle, Drachrosenstein. When none of the others are looking, 6-year-old Bärbel gathers a few of the black flowers and instantly falls asleep. Jochen and Natalie determine that they will rescue Bärbel by finding the castle and bringing back the alabaster roses. As the adventure begins, like Alice in Wonderland, Jochen and Natlie are whisked into an enchanted otherworld where they meet an old man who gives them a magic locket that will show them the way to the castle. But others want the locket, especially the dark magician Gorkievich, who needs it to consummate his power and will do anything to obtain it. Jochen and Natalie venture forth, confronting fire-breathing dragons, mysterious caves, magic mirrors and impenetrable labyrinths. As Jochen and Natalie advance from one harrowing incident to another, Schoeffner interweaves fantastic action with overformal dialogue, like something from a Lovecraftian tale. The magicians, although supernaturally powerful, don’t have much of a chance against the two young siblings whose innocence and luck, along with a quixotic attitude, combine to make them invincible. Schoeffner’s command of the English language is, on the one hand, remarkable, employing multisyllabic words of erudition and sophistication. On the other hand, it’s evident that English is not the author’s native tongue because sentence structures exhibit less refinement and the book’s formatting, particularly the widespread, unconventional use of dashes to set off dialogue, is somewhat vexing. However, once the reader gets a handle on the unique prose and formatting, they don’t prove to be problems and even add a certain charm to the story. A typical fantasy tale of magic and monsters, with enough freshness to keep the pages turning.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456797447
Page Count: 390
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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