A sequel that improves upon the original; worth reading.
Michael Henry’s adventures continue in O’Brien’s (The Land of Whoo, 2012) latest installment of his series.
Michael Henry and his friend Savannah have returned to Earth after their adventures in the Land of Whoo; they’re hoping for a peaceful summer vacation. But when Michael Henry receives an urgent call for help from King Vincent of the Land of Coral Seas, he realizes that, as the bearer of the powerful Medallion, he must help the king. King Vincent’s daughter Ariana has been kidnapped by the Wizard of Pisode, who demands that the king renounce his throne. Ariana has been locked in a cave at the end of a booby-trapped maze. Unless Michael Henry can rescue her within three weeks, the cave will flood, and the princess will drown. Michael Henry must also deal with the wizard’s pirate allies, led by the traitorous Capt. Sturges. To save the princess and defeat the king’s adversaries, Michael Henry assembles his team of friends from Earth and the Land of Whoo and brings them to the Land of Coral Seas. While O’Brien’s work still shows a few rough edges, this book is considerably more sophisticated than his last. He digs deeper into his returning characters and presents them with far more depth and interest. He also throws them into situations where they must make difficult decisions—including one or two points where there is no clear right answer. The result is a realistic and appealing installment of the series. O’Brien’s occasionally odd word choices are a bit distracting; for example, “contingency” and “contingent” are used interchangeably. On the whole, however, this tale is not only entertaining, it breaks the mold of teenage wizard stories.
A sequel that improves upon the original; worth reading.Pub Date: May 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988824409
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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