A promising start to a new fantasy series.
In Winterstaar’s debut fantasy romance, a recently divorced woman and her three young children are pulled into a different world—one where she’s expected to be a prophecy-fulfilling queen.
As her marriage unravels, Adele retreats to her dreams: nightly rendezvous with a man she’s never met who nevertheless seems to be everything she’s longed for in a lover. Though they can’t touch or speak in her dreams, their passion is strong enough to haunt her waking life. Adele’s dreams connect her to a magical world called Evendaar: a realm haunted by a prophecy about the end of the world and “A child born into the Golden Age [who] shall be stolen from the Light and hidden from the eyes of the world.” High Wizard Ohren knows that Adele is this child, sent to the mundane world by his own magic long ago; she is, in fact, the rightful heir to the Throne of St. Lucidis and destined to protect the kingdom of Unisia. Not that Adele has any idea how to do so. Summoned by Ohren’s magic, she and her three kids enjoy a life of luxury while she tries to figure out her purpose. Then her dream man walks into a royal reception: he’s the outcast Prince Rainere of the Marchant family, an Immortal rumored to dabble in Dark Magic. Still, Adele starts a secret affair with Rainere, little knowing that he, like Ohren, sees her birthright as a potential weapon to be wielded. Even as he urges her to marry him, he’s in league with dark forces with their own sinister agendas. Although Adele is initially passive in her dealings with Ohren, Rainere, and the court intrigues she’s thrust into, debut author Winterstaar effectively shows how she gains confidence and strength, determined to be the best queen she can be, however absurd that notion is. The author’s prose is unusually straightforward for the genre, which makes for a page-turner. In particular, she’s adept at revealing detail slowly and naturally, without falling into the common fantasy-writer trap of seemingly endless expository monologues. This results in a tale that’s readable, layered, and engaging throughout.
A promising start to a new fantasy series.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-99-147942-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Evendaar Publishing LLP
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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