A riveting tale and invigorating characters should have readers locked into this adventure series.
Some wayward youths unexpectedly find themselves in a world of giant creatures and cannibalistic hunters in this sci-fi–infused novel.
Robbing banks with his uncle could have earned Tanner Kurtz a sentence at a youth detention facility. But he opted to stay at the Halton House, a farm that offers juvenile delinquents a second chance. Returning from a basketball game one evening, Halton House “father” Mr. Conroy has to turn the van around after a landslide effectively closes the highway. The group braves the pothole-laden Windigo Road but unfortunately winds up in an accident. Tanner and others, like hotheaded Colby, assess the aftermath: one person seriously injured; another missing. But their surroundings are considerably more disturbing, with the crew immediately seeing three unfamiliar ringed planets in the sky. There’s a threat of massive, hostile birds and no cell reception, but it’s not all bad: Tanner, et al. come across unicorns and are taken in by a seemingly friendly tribe, the Sawnay. The tribe, which willingly crossed from Earth into the World of Dawn via a portal years ago, is willing to help the newcomers get home. The not-as-cordial Wendo, however, are cannibals that may be more lethal than the beasts. Gale’s (The Stories That Make Us, 2015) book is a striking series opener that quickly introduces its titular world while slyly adding engaging elements. Characters, for one, are gradually drawn out, especially Tanner: snippets of his woeful past (as flashes of memory) form a rounded protagonist whose mother died chasing storms and whose father abandoned him. The narrative’s often playfully ambiguous; details about the World of Dawn (the Sawnay call it “Earth’s mother”) make the realm no less mysterious. The Sawnay, meanwhile, are humanized by a dilemma of their own: their slowly dying river, Cootamain, is making people sick. Lingering questions tease a sequel, not the least of which involves the Wendo’s baffling One Who Sees All, who, for some reason, wants Tanner.
A riveting tale and invigorating characters should have readers locked into this adventure series.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5144-3660-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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