A sword-and-sorcery narrative a la Tolkien, being introduced with some fanfare in simultaneous hard-cover and trade paperback editions. As in The Lord of the Rings, a small band of comrades—Man, Elf, Dwarf—must undertake a desperate journey into a kingdom of dread under the guidance of a mighty seer, while their threatened homeland confront the approaching darkness. But the unavoidable comparison is after all only an embarrassment. Warlocks and ancient talismans and a smattering of invented names notwithstanding, Brooks has simply not created any sort of world for Iris Flick and Shes and Menion Leah to figure in. As for the writing, it is less a use of language than a kind of verbal peanut butter smeared indiscrirninately across 726 pages. The brothers Hildebrandt, whose treacly illustrations disfigure the latest Tolkien Calendar, provide the perfect visual correlative to a world in which people are always glancing into each other's "slim faces" and no one seems to be bothered by being in "the apex of [a] circle." None of this can be expected to dismay the s-and-s audience.
Pub Date: April 1, 1977
ISBN: 0345314255
Page Count: 794
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977
SEEN & HEARD
Entertaining, though not in the league of J.K. Rowling—or even Anne Rice. But please, people: no more vamps and wizards, OK?
Harry Potter meets Lestat de Lioncourt. Throw in a time machine, and you’ve got just about everything you need for a full-kit fantasy.
The protagonist is a witch. Her beau is a vampire. If you accept the argument that we’ve seen entirely too many of both kinds of characters in contemporary fiction, then you’re not alone. Yet, though Harkness seems to be arriving very late to a party that one hopes will soon break up, her debut novel has its merits; she writes well, for one thing, and, as a historian at the University of Southern California, she has a scholarly bent that plays out effectively here. Indeed, her tale opens in a library—and not just any library, but the Bodleian at Oxford, pride of England and the world. Diana Bishop is both tenured scholar and witch, and when her book-fetcher hauls up a medieval treatise on alchemy with “a faint, iridescent shimmer that seemed to be escaping from between the pages,” she knows what to do with it. Unfortunately, the library is crammed with other witches, some of malevolent intent, and Diana soon finds that books can be dangerous propositions. She’s a bit of a geek, and not shy of bragging, either, as when she trumpets the fact that she has “a prodigious, photographic memory” and could read and write before any of the other children of the coven could. Yet she blossoms, as befits a bodice-ripper no matter how learned, once neckbiter and renowned geneticist Matthew Clairmont enters the scene. He’s a smoothy, that one, “used to being the only active participant in a conversation,” smart and goal-oriented, and a valuable ally in the great mantomachy that follows—and besides, he’s a pretty good kisser, too. “It’s a vampire thing,” he modestly avers.
Entertaining, though not in the league of J.K. Rowling—or even Anne Rice. But please, people: no more vamps and wizards, OK?Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02241-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are...
From one of the great masters of modern speculative fiction: Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys (2005).
An unnamed protagonist and narrator returns to his Sussex roots to attend a funeral. Although his boyhood dwelling no longer stands, at the end of the road lies the Hempstock farm, to which he’s drawn without knowing why. Memories begin to flow. The Hempstocks were an odd family, with 11-year-old Lettie’s claim that their duck pond was an ocean, her mother’s miraculous cooking and her grandmother’s reminiscences of the Big Bang; all three seemed much older than their apparent ages. Forty years ago, the family lodger, a South African opal miner, gambled his fortune away, then committed suicide in the Hempstock farmyard. Something dark, deadly and far distant heard his dying lament and swooped closer. As the past becomes the present, Lettie takes the boy’s hand and confidently sets off through unearthly landscapes to deal with the menace; but he’s only 7 years old, and he makes a mistake. Instead of banishing the predator, he brings it back into the familiar world, where it reappears as his family’s new housekeeper, the demonic Ursula Monkton. Terrified, he tries to flee back to the Hempstocks, but Ursula easily keeps him confined as she cruelly manipulates and torments his parents and sister. Despite his determination and well-developed sense of right and wrong, he’s also a scared little boy drawn into adventures beyond his understanding, forced into terrible mistakes through innocence. Yet, guided by a female wisdom beyond his ability to comprehend, he may one day find redemption.
Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are shaped by childhood experiences, what we gain from them and the price we pay.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-225565-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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