An expansive, edgy genre piece whose earnest familial theme shines.
In this prequel installment of Markoff’s (The Deadbringer, 2016) fantasy series, a mercenary protects his young nephew, a member of a despised, largely decimated people, from operatives who wish to kill him.
Eutau Vidal made a promise to his sister that he would look after her son, Kira, before she died in labor. Taking care of Kira entails typical child-rearing duties, such as ensuring that he’s well-fed and warm, but also involves concealing Kira’s gray skin—the sign that he’s part of a race called Deadbringers. Kira’s skin rots everything it touches, save for Eutau. In the land of Moenda, the Ascendancy united all the myriad races under one power, while also initiating the Purging against Deadbringers, who, among other things, can bring the dead back to life. Although the South is predominantly free of Deadbringers, Sanctifiers continue to search for any that remain in hiding. Eutau keeps Kira close and helps him overcome his fear of spirits that only he can see and hear. The two encounter an amiable soul, J’kara, and later join her in her home city of Florinia, where a lack of Deadbringers has begotten far-less-cautious Ascendancy members. But Eutau soon craves the freedom he once had in his mercenary days. Markoff’s novella, which takes place 15 years prior to the events of her previous book, is a laudable series forerunner, but also works well as a stand-alone work. It’s impressive how much information is packed into the short tale, including background on the Purging and the traits of various peoples, such as the horns and talons of the Ro’Erden, and Eutau’s pupil-less eyes. Nevertheless, the uncle-nephew bond is the story’s strongest quality; ever protective Eutau is perfectly suited to the father figure role, even if he occasionally regrets his pledge to his sister. Kira, meanwhile, tackles mundane obstacles (such as when his peers call his skin ugly) as well as supernatural ones, all in endearing, phonetic speech: “I pwomise, I’ll be good,” he assures Eutau.
An expansive, edgy genre piece whose earnest familial theme shines.Pub Date: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9971951-3-2
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Tomes & Coffee Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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