An absorbing fantasy novel that delivers many satisfactions.
In French’s (Superheroes in Denim, 2016, etc.) fantasy novel, a young woman gains magical powers and sets out to avenge her slaughtered family.
For 18-year-old Fakhira at Aitrae Oasis in Ilauris, a fantasy world similar to ancient Arabia, the future looks simple: she’ll marry the man her father chose for her, a guardsman for Caliph Korval. But then her father’s rival Caliph Trimar’s forces attack the Oasis; Fakhira manages to hide, but her family is brutally murdered. On her way to sanctuary in Korval’s city, Kamrik, Fakhira falls through a crack in the ground into a pool of water. While she’s submerged, whispering voices address her as “Al-Kabar,” urge her to “Go forth and fight for freedom,” and give her a special sword. Using her new, magical powers, Fakhira plans to disguise herself as a man named Al-Kabar, join Korval’s army, and attack Trimar. She soon rescues a thin young man called Tahjis the Rat from thugs in Kamrik. He sees through Al-Kabar’s disguise but makes a deal to help her. Soon she gets close to Korval and gains his confidence, but she discovers that avenging her family is more complex than she thought, with innocent lives in the balance and more factions vying for power than she’d realized. But if she gets it right, Tahjis’ prediction may come true: that “The time of greedy, power-hungry men leading our people is over. The time of the Al-Kabar has come.” French offers an intriguingly layered world in this novel, taking what could be a simple revenge story and making it far more engaging by considering such things as unintended consequences and competing interests. Her worldbuilding is three-dimensional and subtly realized; for example, Fakhira’s culture, while clearly patriarchal, is also matrilocal. French’s voice is strong and vivid, never succumbing to the overwrought style that often plagues other fantasy books; the dialogue, too, is natural and unstilted. The unpredictable plot features some plans that work and others that fail, and it moves at a fast clip, nicely weaving in romantic elements between the battle scenes.
An absorbing fantasy novel that delivers many satisfactions.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68063-032-9
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Myrddin Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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