by Rusty Biesele ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 2015
A choppy fifth installment featuring philosophical musings and a cheekily optimistic conclusion.
Biesele’s (The Saeshell Book of Time Part 4: The Ceremony of Life, 2014, etc.) latest Saeshell book is his most tangled tale to date.
The sci-fi/fantasy drama continues, opening with a familiar air of foreboding. Clarissa, the titular “Owl from Oblivion,” warns readers, in the disdainful manner of the series’ immortal characters, of the frailties and dangers posed by the human instincts of the central figures in the story. This fifth installment inhabits a world built on overlapping chronologies, with supernatural events and plot revelations featuring nearly all of its complicated characters. The stories feature Stefan, the most powerful alien/human/energy hybrid in existence; his mate, Tova2; his mother, a fairy queen named Anashivalia; Sophistan1, who has the memories of Stefan’s dead father; Stefan and Tova2’s son, Syon; Ty and his best friend, Tyco; the Pauls and Peters from the advanced civilization of Sophista; and many others. Paul25, in response to a major rip in time that Syon caused, transports Stefan, Syon, and others to a new timeline. When they arrive, they have different forms and diminished abilities; Stefan is only 7 years old, for example, and Syon is abused by a villainous adoptive father. They later connect their minds to their previous, supernatural selves and preserve their memories in a shared dream. The author splits the action of the book between the new chronology, in which the young children and a select few guardians advocate for their safety in a hostile world, and the fading dream of the supernatural timeline, riddled with evolving challenges of its own. As in previous books, Biesele uses humanity’s insecurities, lust, brutality, and, very occasionally, capacity for love, as recurring motifs. He also effectively includes revelations about the series’ multiple alien races, such as Sun Gods, Lizards, and Sophistans. However, although this book deepens the worldbuilding of the series, the erasure of the original timeline feels less like a plot advancement and more like a loss for the committed reader.
A choppy fifth installment featuring philosophical musings and a cheekily optimistic conclusion.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Rusty Biesele illustrated by Matt Curtis
BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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
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