Offers an enjoyable romp for high fantasy fans, but lacks rounded characters.
Stephenson and Tedrick (War of the Staffs, 2016) deliver a second installment in their saga of swords, sorcery, and the depths of space.
Picking up where the previous novel left off, the war-torn planet Muiria remains under the threat of Lord Taza, a vampire warlock with the magic staff of a dark goddess and a mighty army. Still, Prince Tarquin—prophesied to destroy Taza—the wizard Celedant, the elven rebel Morganna, and others continue to oppose the vampire, despite his best efforts to kill them. Now the race is on for the virtuous forces to find the lost piece of the Staff of Adaman and turn the tide before it’s too late. At the same time, good and evil engage in a complex dance of coalitions and politics, as each group attempts to bolster its alliances, and Taza tries to frighten the nations of light into inaction. The vampire also plans to travel “through the void in search of new and greater creatures to pit against” Prince Tarquin and his band and “to contact the Shadow Lords.” As tension mounts, the heroes grow closer and learn to lean on one another for support, and sometimes more. But close bonds and noble intentions alone cannot stave off the sinister warriors in the field or the destruction when the two sides finally clash. As in the first volume, complex battle scenes and the myriad races, cultures, and powers in Muiria are strong selling points, and during the quest for the Staff of Adaman, the audience sees even more of this rich, intriguing world. Unfortunately, while the broad scope and multiple perspectives will appeal to some readers, the details may be overwhelming for others, and anyone attempting to read this book as a stand-alone will likely get lost. Additionally, the prose is awkward and excessively specific at times, which can draw readers out of this Tolkien-esque epic: “The prince’s frantic retreat had foiled a deadly blow from her scimitar, aimed at his exposed neck, when he tumbled over a tree root.” Finally, while the story provides more background for the cast’s personal relationships, the characters remain archetypal and simplistic for the most part, making large sections difficult to navigate and showing a lack of depth that plagues the novel as a whole.
Offers an enjoyable romp for high fantasy fans, but lacks rounded characters.Pub Date: July 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61296-905-3
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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