Dark and violent but a tale well spun and with a most satisfying conclusion. Just stay out of the way of the flying fickle...
Ashara Komayd is dead. Or is she? Anyway, hells, yes, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is ticked off, as he so often is in Bennett’s sound-and-fury trilogy.
Readers of City of Stairs (2014) and City of Blades (2016) know the story: in a world that’s part Frank Herbert and part Tamerlaine by way of Conan the Barbarian, the old gods have fallen to iconoclasts and assassins and new deities, as the states of Bulikov and Saypur struggle back and forth for supremacy. Now Ashara, having long ago proven her worth as secret agent and intercontinental mischief-maker, has risen in the world, putting her, in turn, squarely in the cross hairs. Enter Sigrud, who is no one to tinker with. Vengeful but calculating, he’ll shoot anyone, man or woman, who gets in his way: one of his bolts hits an unfortunate guard “right in the mouth, punching through his front teeth and his lower jaw, maybe lethally penetrating his throat.” Suffice it to say that it doesn’t take Sigrud much time to hunt down the chief bad guy, which is only the beginning of a strange tale in which the already magicky world of Bennett’s imagination gets a little more wobbly as the gods themselves begin to intervene, one of them whisking Sigrud off to parts unknown (“He can see he’s on the Continent somewhere by the way his breath is frosting, but there’s no telling exactly where on the Continent”). Alas, all roads lead to still weirder places, in which piffling trifles like life and death—or immortality and divinity, for that matter—don’t get in the way of progress. Fans will cheer for Sigrud, always a no-nonsense character; he’s definitively macho, but not so much that he’s not glad to have the help of the strong women he meets along the way.
Dark and violent but a tale well spun and with a most satisfying conclusion. Just stay out of the way of the flying fickle Finger of Kolkan….Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-41973-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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