An entertaining rookie offering perhaps enjoyed by religiously and morally curious young adults.
Spiritual and moral lessons feature prominently in Colegrove’s debut fantasy, a playful coming-of-age adventure.
With the murky explanation that he needed more special training than could be provided in their small village, 11-year-old Rol’s family traveled a great distance to leave him with his uncle A. Loysius DaTerrin. Rol is 14 when the story opens and, after some initial confusion regarding his role, doesn’t mind life as his uncle’s acolyte. Ably handling the pressure of constant one-on-one training, he falls asleep “dreaming of great adventures in which he played the lead role.” DaTerrin’s lessons often resemble Socratic questioning: why we pray (not just to ask for favor but to express gratitude), the importance of playing, and the weaknesses that belie deception. The latter is learned when master and student expose a fake wizard passing through town. Sorcery isn’t real in this world, though there are orchards of bluish-orange fruit that lose flavor when exposed to the open air; hairy, man-sized lizards; and gnomelike grumblegoblins. There’s also a recognizably Christian tone, with frequent references to God and his creation. On a reflective hike amid a lesson about prayer, the two are besieged by grumblegoblins, who escape with DaTerrin. Rol is left alone, far from home, though a mysterious map leads, he suspects, to his parents’ home. “Be thankful. Be good. Be who you are meant to be,” DaTerrin had told him. Rol chooses the more challenging path the map offers and, in doing so, is met with danger, intellectual trials, and unexpected friends who become traveling companions. Putting his lessons to practice, Rol acquires new skills and shows his mettle, as the true purpose of his training and difficult journey is revealed only in the final paragraphs. Though some plot elements seem clipped while others are overdrawn, the somewhat predictable adventure is full of whimsy and driven by a premise that, for the most part, delivers.
An entertaining rookie offering perhaps enjoyed by religiously and morally curious young adults.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9862643-0-6
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Gabriel Creative Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 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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