A fantasy that offers strong themes and worldbuilding but lacks rich character details.
In a magical city in Italy, three royal brothers struggle with their desires and the roles destined for them at birth.
In this novel, Antonio, Matteo, and Claudio are sons of the Duca, ruler of Panduri—a town isolated from “Outside” (the real world)—where magic is prevalent and all natives are born with a special power. For instance, Antonio’s fiddle can call plants from the ground; Matteo’s poetry has similar potency; and Claudio’s talent involves singing. Their noble blood means the course of their lives has been set from birth, as with all royal sons of Panduri: “The First is Heir….Second is Protector….Third sons are Panduri’s priests, her Gentle Guardians.” But Antonio, the eldest son, rebels against his assigned role—he doesn’t want to stay in the capital plotting the star charts as the Heir. Instead, he usurps Matteo’s job as Protector, heading to Panduri’s border with its enemy town Careri. Matteo fumes at home—until Antonio mysteriously dies, and Panduri’s Deep Lore is thrown into upheaval. Matteo and Claudio are left to pick up the pieces; they’ll uncover family secrets that will set all of Panduri on a new course. There’s a lot to like about Tarquini’s (The Infinite Now, 2017, etc.) Italian-inflected fantasy story, starting with her often lyrical prose: “Poppies leapt from the soil, cosmos orbited the boxwood, laurels leafed the crown flowers, and silverbells tinkled a carillon.” Themes of family and fate are always at the forefront, and the magical talents of Panduri’s people have the dreamlike truth of a fairy tale. But while the author paints a captivating big picture, her small-scale character development remains superficial. Although Antonio, Matteo, and Claudio trade off passages of first-person narration, the voice doesn’t change. Minor characters, of which there are many, have purposes rather than personalities, and it’s difficult to keep track of them because there’s little here to emotionally engage with. The few female characters have little to do besides serving as sex objects or bearing lots of children.
A fantasy that offers strong themes and worldbuilding but lacks rich character details.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-69-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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