Bringing love and unity to a broken land finds beautiful expression in this engaging fable.
This YA fairy tale describes in verse the story of an old curse that must be undone by righting wrongs.
In a fictional world similar to medieval Europe, Caravaille’s monarch rules so wisely that he’s known as King Sagan “the Fair,” but all is not well in his realm. Ninety-two years ago, Merk the Fierce, Sagan’s ancestor, stole the throne by killing King Daemon. Daemon’s dying wife, Queen Oriana, cursed Merk’s line for “three score years and more” with succession problems that would always lead to war and chaos. The aging Sagan, who has no son, wants to choose an heir among his three nephews, hoping the curse will have expired by now. Javan is the bravest warrior; Cadmon is kind and just; Sky is wise. Sagan’s adviser Lord Shin recommends careful study of Oriana’s entire curse, as does Zagir, an ancient sorcerer queen and the oldest person in Caravaille. Sagan earnestly tries to follow this advice, but each attempt to name an heir results in interference by mysterious animals (kestrel, cat, and wolf) who wreck the kingdom’s ancient symbols of royal rule. These can be repaired only by goldspun weaving, an art lost with Oriana’s death. The sorcerer queen holds the key to restoring this practice and the kingdom’s unity, if the right person can divine the truth. Michaels (The Alchemy of Illuminated Poetry, 2017, etc.) uses quatrains rhyming ABCB, which gallop along at an effective pace. The rhymes work well and can sometimes be quite clever: Sagan “found himself bemused, befuddled / By the utter lack of deference, / The experience being quite outside / His lifelong frame of reference.” Also striking are the characters’ struggles to interpret the curse—is it a metaphor or what? Fairy-tale elements like a three-part structure and animal helpers provide appeal, while the story also benefits from an original take on the who-will-inherit question. The book is handsome, with appealing typography and illustrations by the author that enhance the tale’s medieval/Elizabethan flavor.
Bringing love and unity to a broken land finds beautiful expression in this engaging fable.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941067-03-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Alcabal Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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