The plot thickens and danger mounts in the series’ best installment thus far.
Revelations abound in this third volume of Duff’s (Off Beat, 2017, etc.) Weir Chronicles as erstwhile magician Ian Black learns that he may be just a pawn in someone else’s game.
Earth is in grave danger, as evil Duach leader Aeros is draining its core, causing worldwide storms and earthquakes. In his role as Pur Heir, Ian must fight these forces by drawing on his own supernatural connection to the Earth. A summons lures him to Africa, where an experiment with lightning supercharges his own “core”—the source of his powers. Then Aeros’ son Jaered, the Duach Heir, shoots him with a dart that causes his core to overheat, leaving him close to death. His only chance at survival is Rayne, the woman he loves but is unable to touch due to her unique power-draining abilities. She’s already moved out of Ian’s mansion, despairing of their relationship ever succeeding, but his friends persuade her to come back and attempt to drain his core completely, despite significant risks. Later, she travels to Thrae, the Weir’s home dimension, and is shocked to learn of the existence of another Heir from Ian’s mother, Gwynn, among other news. She and her sisters—Jaered’s mother, Sophenna, and rebel leader Eve—hatched a plan long ago to “bring down two tyrants and set our worlds back on an evolutionary track that should never have been tampered with.” Duff definitely hits her stride in this book, as several deep secrets come to light. A change of scenery to Thrae proves to be especially effective, giving the reader further insight into the Weir’s history and way of life. As Ian and Rayne’s romance takes a back seat, Rayne’s decision to attempt to heal him becomes a crucial turning point for them both. The new setting and plot developments are both surprising and compelling, and they bring fresh life to a series that had begun to run low on conflict. At the end, Duff leaves plenty of questions that readers will want to see answered in subsequent books.
The plot thickens and danger mounts in the series’ best installment thus far.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9970156-0-7
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CrossWinds Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 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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