A fanciful guide to nature’s wonders; beautiful, clever, and appealing in every way—a fine achievement.
This illustrated fictional reproduction of a Victorian field guide helps identify imaginary and legendary creatures.
According to the Introduction, said to be written by Angus Willoughby, “CRYPTOZOOLOGIST AND NATURALIST,” this volume contains truthful accounts “of the strange and unusual in the world of nature” so that readers may be best prepared to encounter, propitiate, or avoid them. The beings are grouped into four kinds of Folk (Fey, Wee, Great, and Wyre) and five types of Creature: those that live with people and those of the land, sea, air, and night. Each entry includes an illustration with size, habitat, and description. A Banshee, for example, is 4 to 6 feet tall; its habitat is “Houses; Dark and stormy nights”; and it “appears to those who are to suffer the death of a family member.” Many entries include helpful information: “Upon finding a Land Kraken in your barn or stable, it is recommended that you drive it out as quickly as possible.” While some beings are familiar from folklore (such as Elf, Sasquatch, and Goblin), others are humorous inventions (Thinking Cap, Newsie, and Jackalope). An appendix provides an alphabetical index plus Folk calendars, a bibliography, and an advertising section (for example, “Dr. Pythagoras’ Patented Pixilation Cure”). Barnwell (Oneirognosis, 2015, etc.) is a professional artist, printmaker, and illustrator whose work has been exhibited internationally. The book’s images are perhaps the stars of this show—a brilliantly successful pastiche of Victorian engravings in their exquisite detail, subtle tonal and shading techniques such as hatching and crosshatching, and moodiness (romantic, whimsical, solemn, or eerie as suitable to the Creature or Folk described). The Victorian style offers some especially amusing images; Cyclops, for example, is a prosperous-looking, bearded gentleman with a better claim to his monocle than most. But the text, which describes absurdities in all Victorian seriousness, has a delightfully wry undertone and sometimes veers from the expected. Cyclopes, for example, “are cultured and civilized….Sadly, to date, elected office has eluded them.”
A fanciful guide to nature’s wonders; beautiful, clever, and appealing in every way—a fine achievement.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73396-490-6
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Antarctica Arts
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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