Well-crafted fantasy fiction about a team of young trainees tackling dangerous missions.
A novel follows a new student at the Black River Academy of Swordcraft and Spellcraft.
Durren Flintrand, a young ranger (a fantasy analog to a forest scout in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), is introduced to a diverse group of other beginning students. There is the aptly named Tia Locke, a rogue (a fantasy genre professional thief), the oafish Hule Tremick, a fighter (an equivalent to a mercenary soldier), and Areinelimus Ironheart Thundertree, a tremulous female dwarf (in the Tolkien sense) wizard. Together, the four of them form “Party eighteen,” a sort of trainee adventure squad for fighting monsters, exploring mysterious places, and protecting the weak and helpless. Accompanied by Pootle, a disembodied eyeball assigned to be their observer, they are thrown into perilous operations by the teachers at the academy. With a mismatched set of personalities and diverse skill sets, the members of Party eighteen find themselves frequently at odds and in one another’s way. They must learn to work together and get along, overcoming their weaknesses and growing in confidence, skill, and ability to cooperate. Because of their youth and inexperience, they begin their “studies” with relatively small hazards—their first task is to recover merchant goods stolen by rat-people bandits. Nothing is perfectly safe, not even unicorns in the forest. But the young students’ learning curve is matched by ever-increasing risks, and soon they find their basic training is in the shadow of greater evils than the academy had ever warned them about. Tallerman (Passive Resistance, 2016, etc.) and debut author Wills freely borrow from the pop culture of “Dungeons & Dragons,” “World of Warcraft,” and similar fantasy adventure games, down to the “Level One” in the book’s title. In this way, the text partakes of both the strengths and weaknesses of “gaming fiction” (a notoriously lightweight subgenre of fantasy) as well as the obvious parallels to J.K. Rowling’s famous wizarding school. Familiarity takes some of the wonder away from the fantastic, but the authors compensate with superb pacing, competent writing, well-described action, fun situations, and appealing characters. The first in a series, the book remains a pleasant confection.
Well-crafted fantasy fiction about a team of young trainees tackling dangerous missions.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-927598-51-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Digital Fantasy Fiction
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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