An evocative but slight fantasy about artists seeking fulfillment through art and faith.
A parable about two young people drawn together by spiritual affinity.
In this short book by Pedersen (Sophia, 2013, etc.), set in a vaguely medieval place and time, an illiterate young man named Metaxaeus, working in a village with his parents and friends, is an instinctively, supremely talented sculptor. He knows “how to take from that fountain within and to soak up its knowledge and then how to communicate this truth through the medium of sculpting stone.” He’s mentored in this skill by a mysterious woman named Maya, who teaches him to “Learn with your whole soul how to carve in stone.” He keeps with him at all times a small sculpture of his own creation—an exquisite miniature bird carved from a jewel, which strikes even his workaday parents as life-changingly beautiful. Another exquisite, tiny sculpture is key to Pedersen’s other main character, a young woman named Akasha who lives in another village and has a nearly supernatural gift for storytelling (“she had learned to plunge deep into herself, and she saw things there, things she imagined that other people did not see”). When Metaxaeus decides to leave his village and travel to the capital city of his region, Pederson works to bring the two together in what turns out to be a lifelong spiritual journey. Overall, the author writes clearly and expressively. For example, the plot’s series of visions and revelations are followed by a cycle of prose poems called “The Stars in the Fall,” which continue the themes of revelation and serendipity that drive the main text (“Wisdom never works without a smile,” reads one typical line, “one which then bequeaths itself joyously to others”). But although the story’s main characters have enigmatic mentors and sympathetic natures, there isn’t much in the way of meaty dialogue. The book’s tone is also occasionally somewhat flat, and it relies too heavily on signs and wonders that may wear thin for readers who aren’t already enthusiastic about spiritual literature.
An evocative but slight fantasy about artists seeking fulfillment through art and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4525-9745-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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