A gripping, harrowing adventure tale propelled by a complex, mythology-inflected plot.
A young woman must stop a plague of beasts that threatens civilization in this fantasy debut.
Ri is torn from life in her island village by the Culling, a mysterious horde of creatures that descend on human settlements and kill everyone they can find. She’s rescued by Bryce, a young healer who possesses the eponymous ability to enter waterfalls in one area of the world and emerge in a completely different one. They wind up in Black Valley, a city filled with destitution and ruled by a shadowy tyrant. As Ri strives to return home to her ailing adoptive father, Samuel, she, Bryce, and other traveling companions journey through abandoned temples, encounter spirits, and battle a variety of terrifying monsters. As Ri learns more about her fellow travelers and wrestles with her romantic feelings for two of them, she realizes that the Culling is a symptom of a deeper ill with global implications—one whose cause is deeply intertwined with the three gods who hold sway over the land (Fate, Death, and Eisanea) and her new acquaintances, including Samuel himself. Lem cleverly intersperses these revelations throughout the story, providing tantalizing plot twists and action scenes in tight, forceful prose. Some scenes aren’t for the faint of heart: characters die in gory detail (evisceration, stabbing, getting their soul sucked out); the gods seem uncaring and sometimes downright malicious; and the survivors struggle through vast, desolate wastelands—deserts, dark forests, and storm-tossed seas—that are exhausting even to read about. The characters’ pasts don’t offer up much solace either; like the landscapes, they’re filled mostly with despair. But although the story can dwell a bit too much on the ennobling power of suffering, the cast’s varied motivations, desires, and personalities are vividly sketched out, illustrating just how far they’re willing to go for their loved ones. Meanwhile, hints of humor and self-awareness leaven the story’s melodramatic tendencies.
A gripping, harrowing adventure tale propelled by a complex, mythology-inflected plot.Pub Date: April 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9986129-0-4
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Carpe Noctem Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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