Inspired by McKinley's fascination with fiction with a strong sense of place, stories by nine authors well-known for science fiction and fantasy. Three take on the demanding task of creating a wholly imaginary world. Most satisfying is McKinley's own contribution, in which she returns to Damar (site of the Newbery-winning Hero and the Crown) and creates another strong heroine. Maddy, herder of sheep, is bewitched by a mountain spirit, but her own good sense and the love of her mortal ties extricate her from what was perhaps the analog of an adolescent fantasy world. Embellished with one of literature's more delightful dogs, "Stone Fey" is distinguished by its clarity and freedom from cliche. "Flight," by Peter Dickinson, is a piercingly satirical look at the gory history of an empire. Least successful, P.C. Hodgell's "Stranger Blood" is in the dungeons-and, dragons vein. The remainder of the stories are set in legendary time with mythical or fantastic characters. The best of this group gain strength from their basis in British legend. In Jane Yolen's "Evian Steel," a sword is forged by a band of women and delivered to Merlin, who prophesies that because the virgin whose task it was to dip the sword in blood and water has deviated from the ritual, she shall be barren. Joan de Vinze's "Tam Lin" is a lyrical retelling of an old Scottish tale. Also included are Robert Westall's "Big Rock Candy Mountain"; James Blaylock's "Paper Dragons"; Michael de Larrabeiti's "Curse of Igamor"; and Patricia Mc-Killip's "Old Woman and the Storm." An intermittently rewarding collection for fantasy buffs.
Pub Date: April 14, 1986
ISBN: 0862032806
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986
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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