A novel that celebrates life and love the way only the best fantasy tales can.
In this YA fantasy debut, a magically powered teenager battles a ruling wizard on behalf of her parents.
Sixteen-year-old Tessa Skye lives in the village of Sorrenwood. Her father, Donal, is a locksmith, and her mother, Gillian, ran away—possibly with a lover or to her death in the river—12 years ago. Tessa adores her boyfriend, Ryland, but thinks little of his friend Ash Kemp, who grows shy around her. Lately, Tessa has been using an amulet that she found the day that her mother left, called a “windrider,” to change into a sparrow and take flight. One day, she swoops by the castle of Lord Fellstone, a conjurer who rules the region. He spies her sitting on a windowsill and suggests to his strange, masked apprentice, Ratcher, that they have sparrow for dinner. Tessa manages to escape, and after she arrives back home, Donal confiscates the amulet and scolds, “You can be sure there’s a price to be paid in using that magic.” Elsewhere, fortuneteller Calder Osric ends up in the stocks after one of his prognostications goes awry. Tessa helps free him, little realizing that there’s a link between them. Later, Fellstone’s knights murder someone close to Tessa. Calder discovers the body and informs Tessa that Fellstone possesses a special wand, the dreadmarrow, that can resurrect the dead. In this emotionally elegant debut, author Kaptanoglu takes choice YA themes—such as first love—and juxtaposes them against crafty fantasy elements. At one point, she writes of how Tessa prefers privacy while using the windrider: “There was something about the transformation of man into beast—or girl into bird—that felt intensely personal, like taking off my clothes.” The narrative also makes subtle narrative connections, such as the way that Ash’s quest for Tessa’s affection parallels Calder’s failure years ago to win over his teenage love, Faline. Kaptanoglu should be forgiven if the plot sutures up too neatly, because there are also surprises right up to the end.
A novel that celebrates life and love the way only the best fantasy tales can.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9994492-1-9
Page Count: 253
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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