An ambitious but overly dense fantasy novel with time-travel elements.
Michaels’ fantasy debut imagines an alternate history in which sorcerers battle to shape the world to their liking.
In 1744, after sorcerer Temujin Gur’s black magic foils spellcrafter Zolo Bold’s attempt to overthrow the emperor of China, Zolo seeks out the Prussian princess Freddie von Anhalt, who’s rumored to be a powerful “World Maker” in the making. Gur still manages to assassinate Zolo, but in this novel that leaps through time, Zolo’s death is only the beginning. The princess, known later in life as Czarina Catherine II of Russia, must triumph in a war against the time-traveling 21st-century madman Edison Godfellow, a Nietzsche-influenced immortal who wishes to destroy mankind as we know it and launch a “Grand Evolution” of humanity: “His army of spellcraft captains and Dio Soldati, or God Soldiers, are spread throughout the centuries like a growing pox. We are waging war against them, a war for utopia you might say.” That “we” is Freddie and her allies, including Zolo, the violin teacher and World Maker Niccolo Paganini, and different versions of Freddie herself at other ages. In a centuries-spanning tale of ambition, intrigue, and conflicting political worldviews, beings that exist outside the normal restraints of time fight to realize mankind’s potential. Michaels writes in a dramatic prose style that successfully invigorates the novel’s larger-than-life characters and situations. The diversity of settings (including Central Asian khanates, Enlightenment-era Europe, and a far-future Dubai) makes for fun and evocative reading, as do the winks at real-life history (Edison Godfellow is revealed to have been known by quite a famous name). Unfortunately, the fractured nature of the plot and the complexity of the fictional world force readers to work hard just to know what’s going on. The intricacies of magic, multiple timelines, and political philosophy keep it from being the digestible, escapist fantasy that readers may expect at the outset. Overall, Michaels displays a great deal of conceptual imagination, but more often than not, he lets it get in the way of his storytelling.
An ambitious but overly dense fantasy novel with time-travel elements.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-91963-7
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Del Sol Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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