Grand passion, terror, desire, comfort—it’s all here, and much of it is actual history, in Skurzynski’s spirited retelling of the story of Abelard and Eloise. The author can be forgiven some purple prose and melodramatic posturing on the narrator’s account: Aran is a mute shepherd rescued by Abelard himself from the horrors of an abusive family and then from a man who produces freaks on demand. Abelard, the mesmerizing 12th-century theologian and scholar, has need of a silent servant, as Aran—now called Spider—learns, because he is passionately in love with his student Eloise and their lessons have turned carnal. Spider keeps watch during their trysts, and travels with them when the pregnant Eloise goes to live with Abelard’s noble family. Eloise’s brilliance and beauty glow in these pages, along with Abelard’s reckless, self-centered intensity, and the harshness of peasant life. Spider is helpless to prevent Abelard’s castration by Eloise’s uncle, but that trauma leads him to find, eventually, a voice of his own. A great deal of information about medieval France, gore that won’t disturb the more hardened in the audience, and a famed love story will hold readers and send them to the sources cited at the end. (map) (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-82149-2
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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