A boisterous, environmentally savvy adventure.
In this debut YA fantasy novel, a group of cousins carry on a family legacy of battling evil in a fantastic kingdom.
Eighteen-year-old Tyler Scott awakens during the night as an intense storm rages outside. He’s been having a recurring dream about sea horse–like creatures pulling a giant sailing ship through blue fog. He saw the same ship in real life while he was looking through his father’s powerful telescope. It turns out that his dad, professor Caleb Scott, knows all about the mysterious Blue Galleon. Twenty-one years ago, he and his siblings, Ella and Remy, traveled in it to the realm of Turena, the home of the Nature Keepers, who govern the powers of life and death on Earth. There, they fought for the Light Keepers against the Dark Keepers. A generation later, the Light Keepers need more help from the Scott family, which includes Tyler; his 15-year-old sister, Samara; and their cousins, Cyrus (17), Mantha (15), Maggie (10), and Noah (8). The six kids, along with Abigail, Caleb’s departmental assistant, travel to Turena on the Blue Galleon. Each carries a powerful artifact, such as Mantha’s Waterstone Ring, which can turn her invisible. Queen Alexandra enlists the clan to retrieve the Scepter of Light from the lair of the evil Barrell, who’s closer than ever to creating lasting darkness. For this series opener, Kirkland presents an engaging, structured world for young nature enthusiasts to explore. Real-life astronomical facts (about the blue-moon phenomenon, for example) accompany striking fantasy tableaux, including the Sea of Clouds, where “jellyfish floated into the sky like translucent, pastel-colored balloons, their tentacles fluttering like silk ribbons.” The tale’s central message that “the actions of humans can also influence Nature” is an important one for young readers to grasp. Kirkland’s large cast never feels like a faceless squad because the author fleshes out everyone carefully—from Markis, Keeper of the Light, to Baybourn, queen of the wasp warriors. Well-crafted relationships between characters and the seeding of important concepts throughout should win over fantasy fans looking for a fresh series.
A boisterous, environmentally savvy adventure.Pub Date: July 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-94250-5
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Moonray Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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