A delightful reunion with old friends, sure to leave fans of strong female heroines craving the final installment.
A princess and her eclectic companions continue their quest to collect 13 mythical treasures in this epic-fantasy sequel.
The second volume in Logue’s (The Path to Misery, 2016) planned trilogy finds a small band of heroic friends scattered to the winds after a deadly run-in with the nefarious Prince Arawn of Annewven. Two parallel stories make up the novel’s first third. In one, Princess Eluned has a budding romance with Prince Irirangi of Favonia, a sun-dappled tropical island chain, although her friends are not as smitten by her new suitor. In the other, Eluned’s right-hand woman, Yona, has balked at her arranged marriage to Prince Hevel of Adamah and stolen one of the Thirteen Hallowed Treasures. Fleeing the country in disguise, Yona gets sidetracked while on her way to join the rest of the group. Eluned soon grows tired of her new beau but manages to form a helpful friendship with the twin princesses of Favonia before reuniting with Yona. From there, the adventurers, including Gwrhyr, the magical creature Jabberwock, the giant Bonpo, Chokhmah, and Faolan seek a magical creature who possesses the eighth of the 13 treasures. Along the way, flirtations—between Eluned and Gwrhyr, between Yona and Queen Njima (who joins the group later), and between others—become full-blown romances. The group’s quest for the ninth treasure finds them exploring the ruins of a long-lost, highly evolved society and discovering new facts about the history of their world and their individual pasts. Later, Eluned returns home to her parents’ castle only to find a shocking surprise. The strong ensemble cast is still the chief delight of the saga, and readers will find it fascinating to see the many relationships within the group shift and evolve. Yona’s heist and crafty escape also start things off in rip-roaring fashion. However, the pacing of the story stalls somewhat in its final third, and although the romances are satisfying, some readers might find themselves wishing that Eluned had more to do with her invisibility ring and legendary sword. Still, the series continues to stand out for its foregrounding of friendship, diplomacy, and exploration over gory sword fights.
A delightful reunion with old friends, sure to leave fans of strong female heroines craving the final installment.Pub Date: July 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9883044-8-2
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Low Country Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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