A vibrant, fast-paced, and tense fusion of epic fantasy and hard-boiled detective yarn.
This second volume in a series explores the war between Elves and humans in the realms of the Verin Empire.
The latest from Ray (Gedlund, 2014) continues the broad outline of his debut novel while striking a different register. In a switch from high fantasy to gumshoe mystery (and in a shift to nearly 10 years after the incidents in the first installment), the narrative this time focuses on the character Gus Baston, a wayward private eye in the bustling city of Gemmen. Gus is dodging his memories of the events of the previous book (“The war against Gedlund’s armies of grasping dead and the chilling laughter of its Everlords as they descended from the sky”). He goes from one paying job to the next, drowning his memories in alcohol amid Gemmen’s nightlife. When Gus takes a new case that eventually embroils him in the kidnapping of a prominent engineer, he’s thrust into the complicated and dangerous politics of insurrection. The Elves of the Verin Empire seek their return to power in the Great Restoration, an event long thwarted by the proliferating human use of magic-negating iron in ever expanding railway systems and obelisks. It seems that after a generation of quiet, the Elven Wardens have emerged to kidnap the key engineer of the system slowly strangling their future. The rich fantasy world Ray introduced in the series opener, a fun-house-mirror blending of Victorian-era technology and sword-and-sorcery staples like elves and magic, is here steadily and very skillfully elaborated. The author’s ear for dramatic stagecraft succeeds in bringing his large cast of secondary characters to life. Fans of detailed alternate-urban fantasies like the New Crobuzon tales of China Miéville should enjoy the ways Ray fleshes out the rich palaces and mean streets of both the city of Gemmen and the far frontiers where the larger background themes of empires in conflict and colonialism play out. This is intricate fantasy work in a minor key.
A vibrant, fast-paced, and tense fusion of epic fantasy and hard-boiled detective yarn.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5498-4450-8
Page Count: 491
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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