A fine tale with well-conceived quests, strong characters, exciting confrontations, and a delightful resolution.
Three children continue their mission to ensure the world’s survival in this fantasy sequel.
In the first installment of this series, the white Temple kids—older sister Julie and her brother, Leo—along with their African American neighbor Annabel—sailed in a magical, invisible flying boat on a quest to free water sprites from their monstrous captors. This was the first step in reuniting humans with elementals (such as dwarfs and fairies), ushering in the new age of light. But a great battle is still to be fought, with the children playing an essential role. As Brathnar, King of the Dwarfs, explains, many forces “desire the destruction of the inner light and our shared world….Earth’s fate depends on you.” The kids make a long and perilous journey to bring the Water of Light from deep underground and distribute it (in the form of magical seeds) as healing medicine for Mother Earth’s droughts and wildfires. The threesome also discover what’s happened to Annabel’s missing older brother, Massud, and retrieve an essential artifact that helps them and the elemental powers battle Zuratrat, the fearsome Molten Dragon. Succeeding could heal the world, gain a treasure, and make many wishes come true. The author continues the fun, thrills, and lively characters from the series opener (The Invisible Boat, 2014) in this follow-up for fourth graders and up. Readers learn more about the neighbors in the Temples’ brownstone who contribute to the quest; Mr. Hoover, for example, is a private detective, and he helps the three children nail down clues related to Massud. Müller’s (Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, 2017, etc.) ending nicely brings all the good guys together for a conclusion that’s logical and satisfying. The author’s descriptions, especially of settings, are a joy, with well-chosen details to linger over, whether the location is a fantasy landscape, a magic shop, or a detective’s office. As before, the book has an urgently serious message of ethical responsibility to the environment, but it doesn’t feel preachy thanks to the story’s highly colored adventures.
A fine tale with well-conceived quests, strong characters, exciting confrontations, and a delightful resolution.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943582-98-3
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Waldorf Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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