A solid fantasy that wears its spirituality lightly yet effectively.
In McDemott’s (Inspection, 2013, etc.) latest fantasy novel, an embittered warrior leads a revolt against an ethereal enemy enslaving his people and finds himself in a fight for his own soul.
In the lands north of the Black Mountains, there are no free men—only slaves of the overlord Belenus, one of a race of immortals known as the Fay. He taxes the people of Dokrait into poverty, and when they fall short, he demands their children as payment. Although the hard-nosed, single-minded Keiran commands Belenus’ army, he’s no freer than anyone else; his body still has scars from floggings he received during a youth spent in the Fay’s mines. So, with his deputy and only friend, Caél, he plots a rebellion in order to lead his people out of bondage—through the country of their lifelong enemies, the Alamiri, to the Wildheath, an unsettled land that will become their new home. When Belenus pursues the refugees with an army of hobgoblins, Keiran must confront how his impulse toward expediency, rather than justice or mercy, makes him more like his foe than he cares to admit. The leader of a mysterious band of Fay known as the Others soon tells him that the only way forward is by embracing the Eternal One. The plot’s biblical echoes, with its themes of slavery, freedom, obedience and revolt, are no coincidence. McDermott (Inspection, 2013, etc.) bills the novel as both fantasy and Christian fiction, but like C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, the religious undertones are subtle enough to still engage a secular audience (although the epigraph, drawn from the Gospel of Matthew, does tip the author’s hand). No divine fire ignites the plot, but the characters are real enough, with realistic conflicts; Caél, for example, is torn between his duty to his family and to his people, and an Alamiri prisoner, Jarmith, weighs his desire to escape against his responsibility to prevent a murder. The prose also frequently achieves a gentle cleverness, as when a character quips, “I think if I throw myself on Belenus’ mercy, there will be nothing to break my fall.”
A solid fantasy that wears its spirituality lightly yet effectively.Pub Date: May 31, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: SALT Christian Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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