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
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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