In the first section of this wise, warmhearted fairytale, the elf Yorsh is only a sweetly naïve child; but as the last of his kind, he accepts his destined burden to return summer to a world of endless rain and famine. Assisted by a pair of sympathetic humans and a very difficult dragon, Yorsh discovers that fulfilling a prophecy can sometimes be simpler than it seems. But it can also be more complicated, as an adolescent Yorsh learns in the second story. Even with the help of a dragon and a feisty orphan girl, he finds bringing back the sun was much easier than lifting the darkness of oppression and bigotry. Graceful, witty prose lightly sketches a land filled with astonishingly vivid and original characters. Gentle Yorsh may be an innocent, but he’s no fool; through his eyes, his companions glow with humor, tenderness and courage. Their quest provides plenty of suspense and heroic action, never flinching from conflict or the pain it breeds, yet the narrative continually opts for clever, non-violent solutions; the climactic sacrifice is portrayed as necessary, even glorious, but also almost unbearably tragic. Readers are left assured that kindness and hope will prevail, however tenuously, over anger and fear. (Fantasy. 10+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7868-3636-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
Prefaced by an appreciation from Karen Cushman, this posthumously published sequel to Wise Child (1987) plunges its small band of fugitives into new adventures, but suffers from slow pacing and a general lack of internal cohesion. Furlong revises the previous volume’s ending, so that instead of making landfall on Tir-nan-Og, the healer Juniper takes a needlessly circuitous route back to her native Cornwall, where she learns that her brother, Prince Brangwyn, has been taken captive by evil enchanters Meroot and the Gray Knight. While Juniper helps to organize a revolt, young Wise Child, her cousin Colman (the narrator), and disfigured former leper Cormac join Juniper’s old teacher Euny in spying on the usurpers, then carry out a complicated plot to spring Branwyn. Wise Child and its prequel Juniper (1991) are widely admired for their feminist political and social attitudes and strong-minded female protagonists; here those attitudes are muted, and, seen through Colman’s eyes, the women seem mulish and arbitrary. Readers hoping for a big finish will be disappointed. Furlong merits a memento mori, but this one is more of a rough draft. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-81514-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
An author’s note explains that this volume, the first in the “Johnny Maxwell” trilogy, was written during the first Gulf War, though this is its first publication in the U.S. Johnny Maxwell is like many boys, spending his time after school busily blowing up alien ScreeWee fighters in his new computer game. Until one of the ScreeWee talks to him. She is Captain of the ScreeWee fleet, and she has asked Johnny for safe conduct back to ScreeWee space, because “[w]hen we die, we die. Forever.” Juxtaposed against Johnny’s inexplicably real involvement in a computer game—when he dreams, he enters game space and can wake up only when he “dies”—are the televised events of the first war in Iraq, when the nightly news showed missile’s-eye views of the remote bombing of Baghdad. This offering doesn’t pretend to subtlety at all, but the premise is so very intriguing, and so well-presented (in characteristically wry Pratchett fashion), that Johnny’s cry for the essential humanity of all to be recognized, whether English, Iraqi or ScreeWee, loses none of its poignancy—or timeliness. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-054185-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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