Do you remember, asks the narrator-cat here, winding its golden chain around the tree, how the jealous shaman Kuzma killed the witch Chingis, and in the end spent his days as a hammer, pounding an anvil? That was another tale (Ghost Drum, 1987). Here, Kuzma (with ``Loki's heart in his breast'') claims as his apprentice Ambrosi, born ``sable, snow and blood,'' as his trapper father, Malyuta (slave to the czar), wished. But though Kuzma woos him in dreams and his extraordinary storytelling gift marks him as a born shaman, Ambrosi refuses to answer Kuzma's call. Meanwhile, Kuzma curses a tribe of the reindeer people (Lapps), transforming them into wolves who kill Malyuta, thus luring Ambrosi into the Ghost World to release Malyuta's spirit and break the spell on the few surviving Lapps. Still, Ambrosi refuses to be Kuzma's apprentice, choosing instead to remain in the Ghost World. Price's language retains the power and poetry of the earlier story, which won a Carnegie. But if Ghost Drum was a mosaic of jagged passions picked out in gold and vivid color, this is a starkly mythic tale in midnight black, icy white, and blood-red. Powerful, amoral, and capricious, Kuzma is thwarted by Ambrosi's native integrity and his love for his father, but there's little hint here of redemption. A dark, enigmatic tale, product of a powerful imagination. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-32544-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a suspenseful first novel, a complacent teenager's intended tryst becomes a weekend of stunning self-discovery. Anticipating a delicious reunion with his high-school sweetheart, Didra, Eric arrives at a secluded country house to find a fugitive from a nearby juvenile-detention center holed up there. Griffin is a paradox: tough, brutally scarred, sporting a self-made tattoo, yet magnetically charming and surprisingly well-educated; Didra, when she arrives, is fascinated by him and his tale of being framed on drug charges. As circumstances force the two young men into reluctant cooperation, the well-planned life Eric is weaving for himself begins to unravel under Griffin's merciless scrutiny. After a shocking series of revelations—Didra's faithlessness to Eric, in the service of her TV career, is only the first—Eric finds himself swinging between rage, fear, desire for Griffin's sister Jojo and confusion at what is, by his lights, irrational behavior. Still, in the end, refusing to let Griffin face the music alone, he gives up a chance to get away. The nature and value of art is an important subtheme here; strong or weak, most of these characters are artists. The author tries their mettle in an intricately complex situation—laced with storms of emotion and violence (Griffin spends most of the novel bleeding from one wound or another)—and ably delivers some sharp insights into what makes people tick. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-30855-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
Pitamic bites off more than she can chew with this instructional art volume, but its core projects will excite in the right context. Twelve pieces of fine art inspire two art projects apiece. Matisse’s The Snail opens the Color section; after history and analysis, there’s one project arranging multicolored tissue-paper squares and one project adding hue to white paint to create stripes of value gradation. These creative endeavors exploring value, shade, texture and various media will exhilarate young artists—but only with at best semi-successful results, as they require an adult dedicated to both advance material procurement and doing the artwork along with the child. Otherwise, complex instructions plus a frequent requirement to draw or trace realistically will cause frustration. Much of the text is above children’s heads, errors of terminology and reproduction detract and the links between the famous pieces and the projects are imprecise. However, an involved adult and an enterprising child aged seven to ten will find many of the projects fabulously challenging and rewarding. Art In Action 2 (ISBN: 978-0-7641-441-7) publishes simultaneously. (artist biographies, glossary, location of originals) (Nonfiction. Adults)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7641-4440-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Barron's
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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