A purposeful and absorbing exploration across dark and rocky terrain.
A headstrong teenager becomes a slave in this debut novel.
As a 6-year-old, Repentance lost her little brother to the overlords. Ten years later, on the day of her buttoning ceremony (an arranged marriage), she refuses her betrothed. She vows never to have children of her own who can be taken away. Instead, she forfeits her freedom. Her decision seems irrational. It shames her family and condemns her betrothed, Sober. The two of them are enslaved. They are taken from their village’s foggy swamps to the ice city of the overlords. Here, Repentance learns the true cost of her defiance. She has become property—a human possession to be done with as the overlords see fit. Slaves who try to escape are punished with death and their families taken as compensation. Sober is beaten; Repentance is sold to a brothel. She despairs for herself but even more for her sister should Repentance continue to buck the overlords. More than ever, her situation seems hopeless. And then she catches the eye of the old king. Apokedak crafts a rounded fantasy world—from the village with its superstitions and traditions to the city with its magical cloths. But for all of its exotic settings, this book is concerned primarily with slavery. Human dignity is the prevalent theme. Iniquities flourish, and Repentance, though a strong-willed protagonist, is faced with a disheartening truth: that fighting against the system will not always make things better. The story in this sense is a difficult read. But its subject matter is leavened by clear prose and well-drawn minor characters. Repentance finds something genuine in the people she meets. She questions her choices and, through the strength of others, finds hope, of sorts, even in situations where none should exist. This may not be enough to sustain some readers, but the author has paced events nicely. As Sober comes back into Repentance’s life, the plot both tightens and unravels. By the third act, readers should hope, fear, and thrill to the prospect of a happy ending.
A purposeful and absorbing exploration across dark and rocky terrain.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947446-00-7
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Paraklesis Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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