An adventure of eye-opening cleverness.
This epic-fantasy debut sees a thief unwittingly unleash a demon that feeds on wizards.
There are thousands of kingdoms in the World Belt. Fistmar, a lieutenant in the Thieves Guild, hails from the opulent city of Aranvail. After copying the secret logbook of his boss, Gloster, Fistmar heads to Schtalegaard. There, he robs the foolish Prince Caolan, who’s passed out after a night of drink and gambling. Fistmar later finds himself imprisoned for the prince’s murder, although he claims he’s not a killer; still, Mikhael Schtalfir, Duke Schtalegaard’s castellan, plans to torture the thief to death. Luckily, Fistmar possesses a false, magical tooth—a gift from the wizard Maevendin—that helps him pick the lock and escape his dungeon cell. Yet as he’s running through the labyrinthine prison beneath the Duke’s castle, the tooth seems to guide him. He finds a chamber of blue stone, and within it is a door that the wizard Faeramivor, who worked alongside Mikhael, warns him not to open. But open it he does, releasing a demon that explosively drains Faeramivor’s essence. Fistmar uses the ensuing chaos to head for Aranvail, seeking to clear his name of the Prince’s murder. However, a trio of warrior spirits tell him, “You freed the demon, and in doing so, you were bound to it.” In this striking debut, author Macdonald breaks from the epic-fantasy herd with electric prose and a true sense of the cinematic. Major characters receive memorable introductions, including Miranna, the famous, beautiful gambler whom Fistmar loves; and Norvik, who reluctantly helps him escape Aranvail’s treachery. The demon is fabulously described: “Teeth swam beneath its skin, to sometimes tear through in rictus grins, or to fly forward on tentacle limbs.” Macdonald also has great fun with magic, employing portals controlled by warlocks called the Scarlet Brotherhood, and Soulstones that can transfer spirits to fresh bodies. The worldbuilding and plot never compete with each other, resulting in an excellent series foundation.
An adventure of eye-opening cleverness.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9979231-1-7
Page Count: 462
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2018
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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