This fantasy delivers a bright tsunami of hormones and heroism.
A YA novel stars a teenager who can morph into a humanoid dragon.
High school sophomore Koji Owens and his dad have just settled in Yonkers. Koji’s father has retired from flying F-16s for the Air Force, and the teen hopes to make friends he won’t have to move away from. He’ll be attending the prestigious Saint Bernard’s Catholic School. While preparing for his first day, he trips over a small purple package in his bedroom doorway. Without time to open it, Koji pops the mystery gift into his dresser and heads to school. There, he helps the gorgeous Claire Faust as she stumbles from her ride to the curb. Her “dazzling sea-green eyes” enamor him instantly. Later, in chemistry class, Koji befriends Drake Collins, a genius, loner, and potential tutor. Surprisingly, Koji also discovers the package—that he’d secured at home—in his locker. When he gets home after school, the gift tumbles from his backpack. He finally opens it, finding a bracelet adorned with a seashell-like fragment. Once on his wrist, the bracelet gives him a layer of onyx scales, horns, and talons for feet. He also has wings and he attempts to fly over Manhattan to disastrous effect. In this endearing origin story, Conway (Harbinger, 2018, etc.) hits the high notes for YA romance readers and superhero devotees alike. An intriguing mystery kicks into gear, as well, when Koji learns he’s not the only person with a magical bracelet. The enigmatic female dragon Oceana teaches him the rules governing their elemental power. Koji’s chaotic personal life, including his crush on classmate Madeline Ignatius, keeps dramatic pace with dragon battles that level portions of New York. He takes seriously the phrase relating great power to great responsibility, insistent on fighting evil despite Oceana’s warnings to hide. The author keeps her tale fun and nerdy, luring fans toward an epic finale but also creating characters readers would love to see grow throughout a series.
This fantasy delivers a bright tsunami of hormones and heroism.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945654-21-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Owl Hollow Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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