A spirited, ambitious start to a planned series.
In McDowell’s fantasy debut, a Virginia college student learns that he’s fated to restore peace and balance to four realms—but he may instead lay waste to everything.
Freshman Adam Taylor is looking forward to a North Carolina archaeological dig with professor Lance Washington and his fellow students. But the rock they’re looking for, the Nezera, turns out to have ties to Adam and his friends Nolan Williams, Jessica Jefferson, and Mary Glass. They’re all direct descendants of founding members of the Order. This centuries-old group, to which the professor currently belongs, protects the human realm of Calterone. There are three other realms as well, but Kitrona, where the evil Grey Bloods reside, is the greatest concern. The Grey Bloods can destroy all the other realms if they possess the Nezera, which, according to prophecy, can only be found by someone known as “the Sequoia.” Washington ultimately determines that Adam is the Sequoia, and he enlists him and his pals into the Order so that they can undergo the extensive training they’ll need for their mission. Meanwhile, Grey Bloods start showing up in Calterone—one or two at time—with violent intentions. Adam has the power to return all the realms to harmony, but new information about his parents’ mysterious deaths could send him on a different, more destructive path. McDowell’s plot gets progressively more engaging as it unfolds. After he firmly establishes the Grey Bloods as formidable villains, he introduces characters from other realms, including vampire-esque Boefangs and others that could be either friends or foes. The Order also gets a rich historical background; for instance, its members’ weapons, Ceptors, contain pieces of a particularly famous lightning rod. That said, McDowell sometimes skimps on narrative details. He offers no description of one minor character, for instance, other than to say that he’s a gnome. Still, he delivers a fantasy tale that’s unusually free of obscenities and graphic violence, although torture scenes are implied. There are also some exciting plot turns, such as the revelation of a mole within the Order.
A spirited, ambitious start to a planned series.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-07506-7
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Arjon Media & Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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