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Child Of Vengeance (2013)

by David Kirk(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0385536631 (ISBN13: 9780385536639)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Doubleday

review 1: Having been rather obsessed with Japanese short stories throughout the course of my ungrad college career, I eagerly snapped up "Child of Vengeance" by David Kirk. While I was not disappointed, I did feel like the author never fully delved behind the psychology of the samurai. Yes, the samurai glorified death, but the reasoning behind *why* was never fully fleshed out, at least until where I could understand where Bennosuke and his fellow samurai were coming from. The story is extremely interesting, however, and worth a read, if just to recognize the full-blown, all-out dedication of the samurai.
review 2: A fairly easy-paced story exploring and questioning what it meant to be samurai in the late 1500s/early 1600s, culminating in the large Battle of Sekigaha... morera that marked the start of the Tokugawa shogunate. Follows a boy whose samurai father left him after the mother's death, leaving him to be raised by two uncles, one a wise monk and one a bluff warrior, while the father serves his liege-lord. After 8 years of war, having earned the esteem of his liege but the enmity of a spiteful young allied lord, the father returns home, and shortly thereafter the boy learns the terrible secret of how his mother really died. What follows is the story of a minor vendetta and plots for revenge. There are short episodes of action, but most of the story consists of the boy, somewhat Hamlet-like, trying to figure out who he is, what is the right thing to do and how to do it, and the reader exploring the world and the mentality of the samurai during this era. less

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