Another consummately skillful, wise, sometimes hilarious, iconoclastic performance, although possibly too relentlessly...
Contemporary alien-visitors yarn from the author of Singer From the Sea, 1999, etc. The benevolent alien Pistach contact hardworking Benita Alvarez. They give her a message cube to present to the authorities—and they also give her the mental balance necessary to break free of her detestable personal circumstances. At length the cube, which shows how the Pistach can help humanity prepare to join the galactic federation by solving such intractable problems as crime, poverty, famine, and slavery, reaches the president. He engages Benita as liaison to the aliens. But predator races have also discovered Earth, say the Pistach, and intend to use the planet as a gigantic hunting ground. Certain politicians are willing to cooperate with them in return for power and wealth. Soon, though, the Pistach methods show near-miraculous results. The Pistach derive their ethos from a holy Fresco painted by the hero Canthorel. The pictures tell a story that inspires and impels the Pistach to help other races, even though the pictures are so dirty that the details cannot be discerned. Naturally, it’s unthinkable to clean and possibly damage the Fresco. Then the heretic, T’Fees, cleans the Fresco, revealing the truth: the Pistach were conquerors and slavers! Pistach plunges into despair. The Pistach, however, are notably untalented artists, and this fact gives Benita an idea how humans may be able to help the Pistach.
Another consummately skillful, wise, sometimes hilarious, iconoclastic performance, although possibly too relentlessly polemical for some tastes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97879-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Eos/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Arden has shaped a world that neatly straddles the seen and the unseen, where readers will hear echoes of stories from...
Arden’s supple, sumptuous first novel transports the reader to a version of medieval Russia where history and myth coexist.
In a village in the northern woods where her father is the overlord, Vasya, a girl who has inherited her royal grandmother’s understanding of magic and the spirits that inhabit the everyday world, is born to a mother who dies in childhood. Raised by a kind father, an anxious and spiteful stepmother, a wise nurse, and four older siblings, the feisty and near-feral girl—“too tall, skinny as a weasel, feet and face like a frog”—learns to talk with horses and befriends the household and forest spirits that live in and around the village. These, say the handsome young priest who has been exiled to serve their household, are demons and deserve to be exorcised. The battle between Vasya and driven Konstantin, who spends his free time painting icons, fuels the plot, as does the presence of two of the old gods, who represent death and fear. Arden has obviously immersed herself in Russian history and culture, but as a consummate storyteller, she never lets the details of place and time get in the way of a compelling and neatly structured narrative. Her main story, which has the unmistakable shape of an original fairy tale, is grounded in the realities of daily life in the time period, where the top of a large stove serves as a bed for the elderly and the ill and the dining hall of the Grand Prince of Moscow reeks of “mead and dogs, dust and humanity.” Even minor characters are given their own sets of longings and fears and impact the trajectory of the story.
Arden has shaped a world that neatly straddles the seen and the unseen, where readers will hear echoes of stories from childhood while recognizing the imagination that has transformed old material into something fresh.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-88593-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
An instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.
Rival magicians square off to display and match their powers in an extravagant historical fantasy being published simultaneously in several countries, to be marketed as Harry Potter for adults.
But English author Clarke’s spectacular debut is something far richer than Potter: an absorbing tale of vaulting ambition and mortal conflict steeped in folklore and legend, enlivened by subtle characterizations and a wittily congenial omniscient authorial presence. The agreeably convoluted plot takes off with a meeting in of “gentleman-magicians” in Yorkshire in 1806, the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The participants’ scholarly interests are encouraged by a prophecy “that one day magic would be restored to England by two magicians” and would subsequently be stimulated by the coming to national prominence of Gilbert Norrell, a fussy pedant inclined to burrow among his countless books of quaint and curious lore, and by dashing, moody Jonathan Strange, successfully employed by Lord Wellington to defeat French forces by magical means. Much happens. A nobleman’s dead wife is revived but languishes in a half-unreal realm called “Lost-hope”—as does Stephen Black, the same nobleman’s black butler, enigmatically assured by a nameless “gentleman with thistle-down hair” that he (Stephen) is a monarch in exile. Clarke sprinkles her radiantly readable text with faux-scholarly (and often hilarious) footnotes while building an elaborate plot that takes Strange through military glory, unsuccessful attempts to cure England’s mad king, travel to Venice and a meeting with Lord Byron, and on a perilous pursuit of the fabled Raven King, former ruler of England, into the world of Faerie, and Hell (“The only magician to defeat Death !”). There’s nothing in Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, or any of their peers that surpasses the power with which Clarke evokes this fabulous figure’s tangled “history.” The climax, in which Strange and Norrell conspire to summon the King, arrives—for all the book’s enormous length—all too soon.
An instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-416-7
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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