A delightful adventure with an idealized hero.
A new-adult fantasy novel invokes the magic of sorcery and stories.
Pierce King has everything figured out. At the age of 26, he’s finally landed his dream job at a major Los Angeles publisher, and he’s poised to marry the woman of his dreams. But his life gets completely scrambled when a strange homeless man attacks him with a book and he finds his world consumed by magic. The novel’s oral storytelling style really sells this transition, which might otherwise feel awkward. Instead, the prose delivers the emergence of magic and the shifts between point-of-view characters with a wink and a nod that keep the tale fun and engaging. Pierce knows he has to return the world to normal to stop the chaos—not to mention saving his fiancee from transforming into a troll—but to do that he’ll have to contend with more than a few supernatural challenges and some beings with vested interests in how the magic shakes out. Along the way, Pierce tries to sort through who his friends and enemies are, from Rex, his childhood pet–cum-dragon, and a fastidious rabbit to the vagrant who started it all and a demon who used to be an orca. Finally, Pierce also has to contend with his own relationship with magic, which goes much deeper than the stories he loved as a child or the ones he brings to life now. Walsh’s (The Serpent League, 2019, etc.) book is, ultimately, a charming adventure yarn that will satisfy many readers. Others may take issue with the story’s tendency to idolize Pierce, whether for his past lives in Arthurian legend or the more mundane fact that he goes from an assistant to a department head in one step. In addition, the tale occasionally implies disparaging things about contemporary SF and fantasy stories more committed to themes, deeper meanings, and representation: “The only thing these piles of nonsense could catch are the attention of people who can’t tell fantasy and current affairs apart.” The novel is captivating when it focuses on its own fun but tiring when it eyes the rest of the genre.
A delightful adventure with an idealized hero.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64119-166-1
Page Count: 252
Publisher: City Lights Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
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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