A solid adventure with a determined heroine.
A teenage girl who has magical powers that affect recollections sets out to avenge her family in this fantasy series opener.
When Elan Montescue was 6 years old, her family’s villa was burned and her father and brother murdered. Thanks to her loyal tutor, Gregor, Elan escaped, fleeing to an ancient Keep in the mountains. The girl vowed revenge, using her powers as a “memory witch.” By using crystals and pieces of cloth to focus her abilities, Elan can gather memories from people and also force them to remember what they’d prefer to forget. The day after her 16th birthday, she leaves the safety of the Keep to hunt down and kill the men who destroyed her family. She ventures out into Riege, where the political situation is precarious. The elderly king is growing weak, opening a power vacuum that the Order, a religious group, is ruthlessly maneuvering to fill while the Karators—red-skinned foreigners said to be savage—are restless. As she searches, Elan faces enormous danger on several sides. But she may be able to connect with the “Anaiah,” a boy her age who’s a perfect match; this human crystal grants a memory witch extraordinary power. And some in Riege stand against the Order. Can Elan gather these strengths to work her retribution? Though there are familiar elements to this coming-of-age quest tale, Dillon (Mr. Kunz, 2018, etc.) conjures up an original take with the cloth-and-crystal-magic theme. Crystals are the more traditional magical item; but as Elan uses the cloth, it becomes clearer how certain colors, weaves, and other particularities relate well to the differing textures of memory. The author also nicely integrates a romantic plot, when Elan meets her Anaiah—whose first touch causes literal sparks—with several mysteries, both political (What has the Order been up to? What do the Karators intend?) and personal (what has become of Elan’s mother, Catherine, who left her when she was very young, and why did she depart?). While Book One comes to a satisfactory conclusion, the groundwork is set for future volumes in the series.
A solid adventure with a determined heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-578-40450-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: RJA Enterprises
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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