Strong cliché-free style, wondrous detail, and gifted moments show Farris chained by genre, a Bernini carving in soap. Great...
Third in Farris’s Fury series—The Fury and then (25 years later) The Fury and the Terror (2001)—again involving doppelgängers.
The Fury led us into the lives of the parted-before-birth psychic twins Gillian and Robin Bellaver and their encounters with MORG, a secret government organization investigating the uses of psychic terror. The Fury and the Power finds college grad and psychic Eden Waring hiding from MORG while Portland and Nashville get nuked. Eden, like Robin and Gillian, has a psychic twin, or doppelgänger, the talky, free-spirited Gwen, usually invisible but even more powerful than Eden. The evil Mordaunt, God’s satanic aspect, is himself split in two—to dim his destructive fury—and seeks to absorb Gwen and recover his full powers. Mordaunt announces his new drive for Ascendancy by having a golem bite out the neck of Pledger Lee Skeldon, the country’s leading evangelist, who is inhabited by a spirit that’s one of the Twelve, the disembodied Caretakers led by Pope John who are devoted to keeping Mordaunt in his weakened split state. The Twelve know that Eden Waring, who contains Gwen, is the Avatar, which Mordaunt knows as well. Mordaunt’s feminine half is what has been split off, explaining why he wants to take into himself the powers of Gwen, and so he tracks down Eden in Kenya, as she recovers from her appearance in the last Farris novel. Mordaunt comes as superillusionist Lincoln Grayle, who does tricks that demand real magic and runs a Vegas casino as bright as Spielberg’s spaceship in Close Encounters (King fans will recall the Evil in Vegas in The Stand). This ties in with the Assassin—lately of the FBI’s secret Impact Sector, who once killed the now resurrected Eden—who kidnaps Eden’s adoptive mother to lure Eden to him for a kill that really kills.
Strong cliché-free style, wondrous detail, and gifted moments show Farris chained by genre, a Bernini carving in soap. Great for the fans. Avenging Fury ahead.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87728-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
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