A gripping, harrowing adventure tale propelled by a complex, mythology-inflected plot.
A young woman must stop a plague of beasts that threatens civilization in this fantasy debut.
Ri is torn from life in her island village by the Culling, a mysterious horde of creatures that descend on human settlements and kill everyone they can find. She’s rescued by Bryce, a young healer who possesses the eponymous ability to enter waterfalls in one area of the world and emerge in a completely different one. They wind up in Black Valley, a city filled with destitution and ruled by a shadowy tyrant. As Ri strives to return home to her ailing adoptive father, Samuel, she, Bryce, and other traveling companions journey through abandoned temples, encounter spirits, and battle a variety of terrifying monsters. As Ri learns more about her fellow travelers and wrestles with her romantic feelings for two of them, she realizes that the Culling is a symptom of a deeper ill with global implications—one whose cause is deeply intertwined with the three gods who hold sway over the land (Fate, Death, and Eisanea) and her new acquaintances, including Samuel himself. Lem cleverly intersperses these revelations throughout the story, providing tantalizing plot twists and action scenes in tight, forceful prose. Some scenes aren’t for the faint of heart: characters die in gory detail (evisceration, stabbing, getting their soul sucked out); the gods seem uncaring and sometimes downright malicious; and the survivors struggle through vast, desolate wastelands—deserts, dark forests, and storm-tossed seas—that are exhausting even to read about. The characters’ pasts don’t offer up much solace either; like the landscapes, they’re filled mostly with despair. But although the story can dwell a bit too much on the ennobling power of suffering, the cast’s varied motivations, desires, and personalities are vividly sketched out, illustrating just how far they’re willing to go for their loved ones. Meanwhile, hints of humor and self-awareness leaven the story’s melodramatic tendencies.
A gripping, harrowing adventure tale propelled by a complex, mythology-inflected plot.Pub Date: April 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9986129-0-4
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Carpe Noctem Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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