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 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
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
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