Synopses & Reviews
From the celebrated author of
Big Fish comes an imaginative, moving novel about two sisters, their dark legacy, and the magical town that entwines them.
Helen and Rachel McCallister, who live in a town called Roam, are as different as sisters can be: Helen, older, bitter, and conniving; Rachel, beautiful, naïve — and blind. When their parents die suddenly, Rachel has to rely on Helen for everything, but Helen embraces her role in all the wrong ways, convincing Rachel that the world is a dark and dangerous place she couldn't possibly survive on her own... or so Helen believes, until Rachel makes a surprising choice that turns both their worlds upside down. In this new novel, Southern literary master Daniel Wallace returns to the tradition of tall tales and folklore made memorable in his bestselling novel Big Fish. Wildly inventive and beautifully written, The Kings and Queens of Roam is a big-hearted tale of family and the ties that bind.
Review
“There is much magic in Daniel Wallace's superb new novel — curses, caves, even a haunted wood — but the most impressive magic is Wallace's understanding of the human heart's depths and vagaries. The Kings and Queens of Roam is a fairy tale for adults.” Ron Rash, author of Nothing Gold Can Stay
Review
“Full of adventure, ghosts, steam-punk industrialists, silk-traders, wild dogs, and mysterious lumberjacks, Daniel Wallace’s The Kings and Queens of Roam is touched with both magic and whimsy. I paused just as often to savor the beauty of Wallace’s sentences as I did to wipe away tears at his characters’ predicaments. An epic and modern fairy tale of sisters and friendship, The Kings and Queens of Roam is about the lies we tell, to ourselves and to each other, and how those stories go on to shape the world around us.” Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
Review
“Daniel Wallace is one of our most masterful storytellers and his latest creation, The Kings and Queens of Roam, is brimming with his brilliant visions and wise observations about life. Part fairytale, part myth and legend, the city of Roam and her inhabitants — both living and dead — materialize in ways that are equal parts comedy and tragedy. At the heart of it all are two sisters: Rachel and Helen, the twists and turns of their relationship leading the reader on a journey that ultimately is a moral tale — one of grief and forgiveness and the meaning of love.” Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life
Review
“A fanciful story layered in symbolism and ripe with lyrical language.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
“Wallace’s eerie fairy tale for grown-ups is a melancholy yet enchanting pastiche of love, loss, redemption, and revenge.” Booklist (starred review)
Review
“An imaginative, sentimental modern-day tall tale....Wallace’s far-fetched, rollicking yarn, written in the vein of Manly Wade Wellman and Fred Chappell, consistently engages the reader.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“Reading The Kings and Queens of Roam is like living, for a few hundred pages, in another world: beautiful, epic, tragic, and ultimately redemptive. In Roam Daniel Wallace has created his own Macondo. This is his best novel yet.” Wesley Stace, author of Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer
Review
“Masterful....[A] complex and gratifying yarn....If ‘Life is about making worlds,’ as one of his characters says...Wallace is truly alive in having made this one.” Indy Week
About the Author
Daniel Wallace is the author of five novels. His first, Big Fish, was made into a motion picture of the same name by Tim Burton in 2003, and a musical version is coming to Broadway in 2013. Wallace’s work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and is studied in high schools and universities across the country. He is a contributing editor to Garden & Gun magazine and is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he teaches and directs the Creative Writing Program. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Laura Kellison Wallace. Visit his website at DanielWallace.org.