A fast-moving, engaging tale in what promises to be an epic fantasy romance series.
A superhuman teen heiress must survive first love and her twin sister’s homicidal ambitions in this novel.
Seventeen-year-old Chancery Alamecha is an evian, a member of a genetically pure race in which humans are a corrupted subset. Evians can live for up to a millennium. They are faster and stronger than humans and can heal themselves from all but the most severe injuries. Chancery’s mother is almost nine centuries old and is ruler of one of the six evian families, to which human leaders pay obeisance. Evian succession defaults to the youngest daughter—in the case of the Alamecha family, Chancery’s twin sister, Judica. Chancery and Judica look alike but have very different personalities. Whereas Chancery is compassionate, Judica is cold and cruel. While Chancery daydreams about living in the human world, Judica trains in single combat (the evian way of settling disputes) and remains consumed by hatred for her sister. The protagonist has no ambition, but when her mother is murdered, having just changed her heirship document to name Chancery, everything changes. More than ever, Judica wants Chancery dead. Chancery must face her in a duel to the death or live forever in exile. She has 10 days to decide. She chooses to spend this time in New York, training with Edam, Judica’s former bodyguard, for whom Chancery has more than a crush, and attending a human school, where she meets Noah Wen, the debonair youngest son of a Chinese magnate. Will Chancery return to face certain death at the hands of her sister? And who will win her heart, Edam or Noah? In this fantasy romance series opener, Baker (Finding Liberty, 2019, etc.) writes simply but effectively in the first person, present tense. The evian world is immediately compelling, emerging naturally from the story and offering some nice points of difference from the more standard fantasy fare of elves and vampires. Chancery is a relatable protagonist, and the other characters remain distinct without drawing too much from stock types. The genre mix is not without issue—for some, the romance and fantasy intrigue will make uneasy bedfellows—but nonetheless the story swiftly progresses, deftly playing to the escapism desired by YA and new-adult readers.
A fast-moving, engaging tale in what promises to be an epic fantasy romance series.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949655-14-8
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Purple Puppy Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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