Watership Down with dinosaurs; at its best when it sticks to the prehistoric record.
In Lev’s debut novel, she turns the modern taste for the post-apocalyptic and takes it back to a real apocalypse: the Fifth Extinction, the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and nearly all life on Earth.
Set in the late Cretaceous and researched almost to a fault—occasional digressions on, for example, the mating habits of damselflies and orchids can feel didactic—Lev’s story concentrates on a group of Edmontosaurus, or flatheads, peaceful plant eaters living their lives by instinct in a world about to change entirely. They’re given descriptive names so the reader can distinguish recurring characters: Mother, Pinecone, Little Tree, and especially Lastborn, the title hatchling, whose inherited mutations make him different from the others. In addition to green eyes and multicolored skin, he’s smarter, savvier and occasionally capable of telepathy with other “changelings” like him. This Gift serves him well after global cataclysm—a comet burns through the atmosphere and creates not only a gigantic crater, but tsunamis, earthquakes and fires. The ash from the latter blocks sunlight, and the once-lush vegetation on which the herbivores relied dies off. Carnivores, at first glutted with the dead, will proceed to extinction themselves. It’s an ambitious endeavor, to say the least, to tell the story of worldwide prehistoric catastrophe; Lev is armed with a formidable bibliography, and most of her scenes are painstakingly thought through, even vetted by a bioscience consultant. A few individual dinosaurs that appear are based on real-life specimens, such as “Sue,” the famous Tyrannosaurus rex whose 80 percent complete skeleton is on display in Chicago’s Field Museum. Though the prose is unremarkable, it both conveys information and teases a narrative out of imagined lives. The sole misstep is in the puzzling choice to bestow the Gift upon Lastborn and a few others of his species. Why, in a fact-driven narrative, is this sci-fi element included? It adds little, detracts more.
Watership Down with dinosaurs; at its best when it sticks to the prehistoric record.Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491003312
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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