Though he brings a tender compassion to many of his characters, Turtledove is no Tolstoy. This vast portrait of nations in...
Fourth outing, with a cliffhanger that promises more, in Turtledove’s tangled fantasy epic of empires fighting a pointless war in which magic kills just as horribly as TNT. It’s too late to say that others have done the sorcery-instead-of-science gimmick better and more elegantly. In his continuing effort to show that human history, even in a drably imagined world reminiscent of late–19th-century Europe, is pluralistic at every level, Turtledove (Through the Darkness, 2001, etc.) piles on subplots involving over a hundred characters in a story that’s too complicated to achieve any momentum. Under the possibly mad King Mezentio, the violent forces of Algrave try to conquer the no-less-aggressive Kingdom of Unkerlant, with the Algravians being a bit worse because they derive the source of their magical powers from murdering the Kuusamians, Turtledove’s vague stand-ins for Jews. With many other minority peoples involved, some willingly, some not, Turtledove has bleached his setting of the customary sense of wonder that magic fantasies can offer, substituting an oppressively gritty realism that comes off half-baked. Instead of telephones, soldiers communicate by magic crystals, shoot beams of fire from magic staffs, fly dragons that drop incendiary eggs, ride behemoths over land, go under the sea clinging to submersing leviathans, and move supplies on trains that run along ley lines. Meanwhile, in an attempt to oppose Algrave’s murderous sorcery, Mages are developing magic that can alter the flow of time, adding even more complexity to a story that desperately needs a sense of direction.
Though he brings a tender compassion to many of his characters, Turtledove is no Tolstoy. This vast portrait of nations in conflict makes War and Peace a breezy read.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30036-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0380977273
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962
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