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
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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