Lush, evocative descriptions carry readers through an unforgettable journey.
A practitioner of magic struggles with her forbidden love for a king as she and her friends/students are threatened by impending war in the second of Gastreich’s (Eolyn, 2016, etc.) fantasy series.
Eolyn, the sole High Maga left in the kingdom of Moisehén, has a small coven with only five girls under her wing. They reside in the meek province of Moehn to hone their magic, an art once prohibited for females. Eolyn has long been in love with King Akmael, but years earlier she turned down his offer of marriage believing that a woman cannot be both Queen and High Maga. Akmael, in the interim, wed Taesara, the princess of Roenfyn, as part of a political maneuver to ensure an alliance between the two kingdoms. Meanwhile, dying San’iloman (leader) of the Syrnte, Joturi-Nur, names his granddaughter Rishona as his successor. Easily defending her claim by killing one of the princes who challenges her, Rishona makes plans to invade Moisehén, where she would have been princess if not for her parents’ murders long ago. She summons Naether Demons from the Underworld, and ensuing attacks put everyone in danger, including Eolyn’s students and friend/music teacher, Adiana. Battling demons may take a back seat for Eolyn when someone abducts members of her coven. Gastreich’s unhurried but engaging tale is heavily populated with characters and social themes, including feminism and bigotry: Roenfyn citizens are known for their disdain for “witches.” Characters are undeniably versatile; Rishona, though unquestionably the villain, is still worthy of admiration—at age 6, she demanded that her uncle teach her to wield a sword. But the story’s greatest triumph is Gastreich’s prose, a consistent blend of lyrical verse and dark imagery: “Trees creaked and groaned as if death were being drawn up in excruciating threads through their roots.” The inevitable clash, while striking, is over too soon, and a couple of significant deaths hardly leave a mark. There is, however, ample material left for the series’ subsequent volume.
Lush, evocative descriptions carry readers through an unforgettable journey.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972320-1-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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