A delightful adventure with an idealized hero.
A new-adult fantasy novel invokes the magic of sorcery and stories.
Pierce King has everything figured out. At the age of 26, he’s finally landed his dream job at a major Los Angeles publisher, and he’s poised to marry the woman of his dreams. But his life gets completely scrambled when a strange homeless man attacks him with a book and he finds his world consumed by magic. The novel’s oral storytelling style really sells this transition, which might otherwise feel awkward. Instead, the prose delivers the emergence of magic and the shifts between point-of-view characters with a wink and a nod that keep the tale fun and engaging. Pierce knows he has to return the world to normal to stop the chaos—not to mention saving his fiancee from transforming into a troll—but to do that he’ll have to contend with more than a few supernatural challenges and some beings with vested interests in how the magic shakes out. Along the way, Pierce tries to sort through who his friends and enemies are, from Rex, his childhood pet–cum-dragon, and a fastidious rabbit to the vagrant who started it all and a demon who used to be an orca. Finally, Pierce also has to contend with his own relationship with magic, which goes much deeper than the stories he loved as a child or the ones he brings to life now. Walsh’s (The Serpent League, 2019, etc.) book is, ultimately, a charming adventure yarn that will satisfy many readers. Others may take issue with the story’s tendency to idolize Pierce, whether for his past lives in Arthurian legend or the more mundane fact that he goes from an assistant to a department head in one step. In addition, the tale occasionally implies disparaging things about contemporary SF and fantasy stories more committed to themes, deeper meanings, and representation: “The only thing these piles of nonsense could catch are the attention of people who can’t tell fantasy and current affairs apart.” The novel is captivating when it focuses on its own fun but tiring when it eyes the rest of the genre.
A delightful adventure with an idealized hero.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64119-166-1
Page Count: 252
Publisher: City Lights Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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