A longish but high-spirited read with a powerful young hero.
In this debut fantasy, a boy who is bullied at school gains confidence and acceptance in magic camp.
Fifth-grader Ezekiel Raroso has magic in his blood. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know this, and when strange things happen around him—the disastrous eruption of his science project, for example—he starts thinking of himself as a weirdo. Ezekiel has a few friends at school, but for the most part, he is shunned and bullied. His loving family has never told him the truth about his past—not even when Ezekiel’s powers become too strong to cover up and he’s sent to magic camp. Camp Strange, as Ezekiel dubs it, is for Faerman children—what the outside world would call fairies. Ezekiel’s ignorance makes him an outsider here, too, at first; but his good nature allows him to make friends with other Fledglings (first-year campers), and he soon begins to enjoy himself. He even sprouts wings. Camp Strange, in fact, is the best thing ever. But there are sinister happenings behind the scenes: rumors that the Hematites (dark, wing-stealing Faerman) have returned. Will Ezekiel and his friends survive their first camp? Perez follows squarely in the footsteps of J.K. Rowling—from Ezekiel’s unmitigated bullying, dark legacy, and natural aptitude for both magic and flying to such facets as magical houses and cuisines and the camp’s bearded Magnus Magister. But Ezekiel is a less hotheaded 11-year-old than Harry Potter was. Ezekiel’s most prominent quality is his empathy, and this, more than anything, forms the crux of the book. He and his friends are distinct characters with their own idiosyncrasies. For all their excited companionship and adventures around the camp, though, what comes across most is their awareness of one another’s feelings. Although the novel has flaws—most notably a danger element put too easily out of mind, explored more as historical backstory than immediate threat—Ezekiel and the others are strong and likable enough characters to compensate. All told, middle-grade readers should approve.
A longish but high-spirited read with a powerful young hero.Pub Date: March 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-251-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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