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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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