This tale offers a fresh remix of familiar fantasy motifs.
A debut novel stars a young royal hesitant to rule even as supernatural hordes close in on humanity.
On the world of Airys, the kingdom of Hatam has been leveled by the Wolf Legion. King Edmund is dead. Prince Eron Eaglesword has fled to Ludamia’s Keep with his mentor, Lucas, chief of the Winged Guardian Order. As the Lycans approach, Eron and his lords commit to wiping them out. But the Wolf King slaughters Lucas, and cowardly Eron surrenders. Two years later, Eron and Princess Luna Flameheart have been living in peasant Rogava, posing as Hans and Gytha, to escape the Ruling Council’s justice. Problematically, the kingdoms of Amondia and Litharia don’t acknowledge the Ruling Council and threaten war. Worse, the winged Vladirian race hopes to turn a fractured humanity into Blood Cattle. Not without guilt over his decision to capitulate, Eron drinks too much and suffers nightmares. When Theodore, a former Winged Guardian, and Lord Gregory Weaverheart, a rogue councilman, track down Eron, they hope to persuade him to return to the once-proud city of Asmara and reclaim the throne. Yet as Eron’s friend Sturage says, “One man can’t liberate a city full of Lycans.” But doing so would make him a deity among mortals, following in the footsteps of Ludamia the Savior himself. In this series opener, Nathaniel lays out a banquet of what fantasy fans will consider comfort food. There’s a race of elegant, otherworldly elves; a mythical sword (the Muric Atamina); and a cult of sorcerers called the Laughing Skull. Smooth prose capably transports readers to places like the Elven city of Elanora in lines such as “the plants had strange variations of blue and purple and their blossoms were shaped to resemble the constellations of the stars.” Luna and other characters, including young Richard from the Institute of Knowledge, harbor secrets that jolt the narrative and add philosophical weight (“We call Lycans and Vladirians monsters...but in reality, our true nature is far more malevolent”). Certain story elements go underexplored—like Luna’s lineage—though the next installment promises a new conflict.
This tale offers a fresh remix of familiar fantasy motifs.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987220-2-3
Page Count: 361
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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