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
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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