Seymour’s artful perfectionism will have readers clamoring for the sequel.
Seymour (Three Dances, 2013) begins a new epic fantasy series in which unlikely heroes must prevent a mythic dragon from destroying the world.
One night in Eldan City, brothers Cole and Litnig each have disturbing dreams. While Lit sees strange figures chained to stone, Cole envisions a black-scaled dragon destroy the world. Then, after Lit has a vision of their friend Ryse in danger, they visit Eldan’s Old Temple, where Ryse is a disciple of the god Yenor. At the temple, the brothers find shocking death and destruction—but miraculously, Ryse lives. As a soulweaver, she taps into the all-permeating River of Souls to heal a small boy; doing so offers her a vision of Sherduan, the black dragon that Cole saw. While leaving the temple, the trio glimpses a shattered dragon statue. “Three sets of golden heart dragons,” says the legend, and “if all of them are broken, a dragon comes from the depths of the void to burn the world.” When Cole meets with his close friend Prince Quay Eldani, he and his brother are enlisted to help save the last two sets of dragon statues from destruction by necromancers. Along the way, Seymour’s cast expands to include a teenage archer, Dilanthia Lonecliff, and a diminutive axe-wielder, Len Heramsun, among others. And while their exploits seemingly echo the many epics crowding this genre, Seymour lets these characters—and their private struggles—command the narrative. He conveys emotional conflict, like whenever Cole thinks of Dilanthia, superbly: “He couldn’t figure out what he wanted her to be. Maybe a best friend. Maybe a sister. Maybe something deeper....” What also distinguishes this fantasy is a clear, unique magic system; e.g., when Ryse heals someone, the soul responds and flows toward her until it forms a “bright, pulsing cloud around her body.” Chapters tend to focus on a character’s personal drama as it roils beneath the larger tale.
Seymour’s artful perfectionism will have readers clamoring for the sequel.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494388485
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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