An often complex and exciting fantasy with a few flaws.
A young witch seeks to break a magical gem’s hold over her in this sequel.
Sixteen-year-old Elan Montescue of the Riege is a memory witch, able to read recollections through crystals and pieces of cloth. In this fantasy series’ first book, Elan left the safety of her Keep planning to avenge her family’s murder, and discovered an outside world full of warring factions. She also met Stille Vespers, her “Anaiah,” a boy her age who’s a kind of human crystal. After using a special “rubystone” to bring Stille back to life, she’s now in thrall to the gem. It wants her to meet with Catherine, the mother who abandoned Elan when she was 5, in the city of Darine. But Catherine is now allied to Our Master, a despot with powers of his own; he rules Karator, across the Impassable River, and plans to invade the Riege. Refugees from Karator live a precarious life in the Riege, where they are mistrusted and scapegoated, but they too hate the Master. Kontessa, a Karator girl with a silver hand—symbolizing resistance to the Master—makes her way to Darine, as does King Marcellus, who survived a coup attempt by a religious sect and now travels in disguise to learn more about his realm. As a great conflict brews, things look dire—but a girl’s voice from the rubystone tells Elan of a way to defeat the Master. Can the voice be trusted? In this rich novel, Dillon (The Memory Witch, 2018, etc.) deftly weaves all these disparate strands together, giving readers a more comprehensive view of the Riege, Karator, and the people of this world. Strong action sequences enliven the plot, which sometimes bogs down a bit in the teenagers’ melodramatic emotions. For example, when Elan tells Stille about his miraculous rescue, he immediately concludes: “You’ve turned me into a monster. . . . I should be dead.” In addition, cloth and crystal magic, so original and integral to the first volume, plays little role here, which is somewhat disappointing.
An often complex and exciting fantasy with a few flaws.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73347-540-2
Page Count: 404
Publisher: RJA Enterprises
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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