While mystical elements befit the genre, the relatable human characters make this story indelible.
When a plague begins killing the citizens of a kingdom, the king, queen, and others embark on a quest to find a cure in this fantasy sequel.
Lissandro, prince of the Frozen Mountains, is visiting the kingdom of Trevalden just in time for the winter solstice. It’s a time to celebrate with his friends Louis, the king, and Selen, who’s likely the only male queen in the neighboring countries. But sudden deaths from a mysterious sickness halt the festivities in the kingdom’s capital of Nysa Serin. It’s quickly apparent that further ailing citizens indicate a plague that, based on an autopsy, isn’t one Louis or anyone has seen before. Lissandro suggests traveling to the Ebony Forest, where there’s a magical place that may have answers—and a cure. He and the royal couple join a small group and head north. But their journey proves much longer and more treacherous than they had envisioned. Bodies along the way seem to point to a murderer within the group. This may be the same person who’s possibly feeding information to bandits who have the travelers in their sights. Back in Trevalden, Lords Pembroke and Josselin, both ministers, try to retain order, which is a decidedly arduous task, as someone essentially stages an uprising. Louis hopes that he, Selen, or another can survive with a traitor in the group’s midst. Even if most of them perish, it only takes one individual to return to Trevalden with the cure. Though Carlsson’s (Rising From Dust, 2017) novel has all the ingredients of a fantasy, such as dragons and hints of magic, it’s the interaction between the humans that propels the story. For example, distrust slowly emerges within the traveling group, and there’s a betrayal in Trevalden. It’s an engrossing approach that leads to myriad dynamic characters, all with their own flaws. This includes the royal couple, two men who are unquestionably in love, as evidenced by their few prolonged, occasionally explicit dalliances. But they’re not immune to friction since Selen’s worry about being unable to birth an heir for Louis makes the king believe the queen is unhappy with their relationship. The author’s descriptions are solid but especially vibrant when lingering on the environment: “The melancholic landscape of fields and copses stretched from a vale to the other. Here and there, bound to the sky by their columns of smoke, homesteads curled in the shade of a forest. Brown, hunched figures hustled around like ants on an anthill.” But there’s an unfortunate lack of female characters, with Kilda, part of Louis’ group, the only notable woman. Adding to that is Louis’ insulting the gender by implying Kilda isn’t “respectable” due to her manner of speech and dress and saying her place, as a wife, is at home. Nevertheless, with quite a few deceitful characters in the mix, Carlsson’s tale revolves around ever changing perceptions, and Kilda’s strength is evident before the end.
While mystical elements befit the genre, the relatable human characters make this story indelible.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 711
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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