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The Golden Chalice Of Hunahpu

Name: The Golden Chalice Of Hunahpu
Author: William Vlach

A NOVEL OF THE SPANISH ATTACK ON THE MAYA

by William Vlach ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 2012

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A historical novel about a Spanish conquistador’s invasion of Guatemala as narrated by three witnesses: a Mayan prince, the conquistador’s wife and a Dominican monk.
In 1524, Pedro de Alvarado entered Guatemala looking for riches; by 1529, he’d subdued the region, largely through wanton atrocities. This novel covers the period from Alvarado’s arrival through his death in 1541. The first narrator is Belehé, who tells the story of being a prince of the local Kaqchikel tribe and a longtime captive of the rival K’iché people. After he’s released, he rejoins his tribe, which is now allied with Alvarado against the K’iché. But the Spaniard’s excesses eventually lead the Kaqchikel to revolt and flee into the highlands. Belehé tells of the years just before and after Alvarado’s arrival, using the symbol-laden imagery of a culture with mysterious gods, and describes the destruction of his homeland in lyrical language (“And when they came, I was frightened, oh, my sons!...They came to warn us of the arrival of the gods”). The second narrator is Beatriz, Alvarado’s wife, whose tale is set during her husband’s governorship of Guatemala. As Spanish nobility, she looks down upon the natives while still recognizing their humanity. Her initial love for Alvarado turns to disgust as she sees what sort of man he is in the New World. The last narrator is Brother Domingo, whose superior, Father Bartolomé, is on a holy mission to convert the local natives. Domingo, torn between the duties of his faith and his own earthly needs, relates the last years of Alvarado’s life as the conquistador goes farther afield in search of glory and gold. Vlach, a practicing psychologist, has clearly done his research for this debut novel; the historical detail is impressive and the settings are vivid and realistic. However, the story doesn’t effectively build toward any sort of climax, which is unfortunate, given the rich material. There are also a few minor slip-ups: Meters are used as measures of distance about 150 years too early, the passage of time is hard to gauge, and the Spanish political situation could have been clearer.
An often enthralling look into a little-known period of history, but one that lacks the dramatic structure for maximum impact.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2012

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 246

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.