This playful fantasy deftly argues that teens can only benefit by widening their perspectives.
This debut YA novel stars a heroine who leaves home to answer the call of a distant mountain peak.
In the land of Mirth, in the town of Slatfoot, 17-year-old Topaz has “long, bone white hair…chalky skin, and the palest of features.” She lives in a tree and tends to her strog, a helplessly rotund creature that lives in her backyard and generates gravel. This is her Fate, as read on her fingernails by an ayp named Murx, an ancient, towering being. (Ayps “walked on their fore-knuckles in a lumbering manner, but could become agile and swift when they had to fight.”) The strog depresses Topaz, but she also notices a “haunting glumness” in the rest of Slatfoot’s people, despite their smiles. One morning, she spies a “claw of light” on the distant mountain peak. She then feels a sharp pain in her stomach. Her “umbi-pit” (or bellybutton) swallows her limb-by-limb. The dull, washed-out Mirth is replaced by a land of flowers and greenery. After waking up back in Mirth, she prepares to head east toward the mountain peak. On her journey, she meets Uniz, a boy with a horn on his head whom she comes to rely on. He possesses a powerful stone coin that once belonged to Murx. Eventually, Topaz learns that she’s been chosen to liberate those with Fates determined by Murx. Despite the cute wordplay (“Snazzlepops!”), Tremblay’s offbeat fantasy is aimed at older teens. “The Truth Portal,” part one, constitutes more than half of the narrative, and “The Color Mayhem,” part two, picks up about a year later. While both sections are reminiscent of a Roald Dahl classic—The BFG, for example—the second reads like a parable. In it, the Slatfooters battle Mirth’s drab surroundings by adopting colors, then joining “color coteries,” such as the Red Specks and the White Stars. They grow obsessed with “out-coloring” one another and sipping “buish,” which causes giggling and daydreaming. These elements speak to the millennial (and even younger) generations’ preoccupation with identity politics and marijuana, both of which can be ruinous in excess. Topaz’s connection to her “grandmamâ” Seraphine shows that individuals always have the potential to keep growing.
This playful fantasy deftly argues that teens can only benefit by widening their perspectives.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9690172-0-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: GrindSpark Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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