A deep dive into recognizable SF territory that’s made compelling by rich characterizations and details.
In this third installment of a YA series, a 22nd-century teenager with superpowers plans an escape for an imprisoned friend while trying to navigate the intrigues of a powerful metropolis.
Fantasy/SF author Denault continues the Prodigy Chronicles that she started with Gambit (2015), detailing the 2160 odyssey of Willow Kent. Willow grew up thinking she was a mining village girl in the “Outlying Lands,” far from the advanced and privileged regional capital, the Core. In truth, she is the daughter of one of the Core’s most powerful and feared citizens. Willow was sent away as a baby, part of long-standing machinations involving genetically seeded “prodigies” with varied superpowers. Willow has blossomed into an especially formidable prodigy. Besides wielding telekinesis and force fields, she harbors a sentient inner force/alternative personality she calls “the tiger” and can barely keep leashed. Caging the tiger’s lethal fury becomes a regular thing. Willow, having been brought at last to the Core and its regiments of military elites, aristocrats, and genetically modified creature weapons, finds her loyalties divided among several suitors. There is massive, macho, and merciless Reece, her protector (and sometimes tormentor); Thess, a Core princeling and fellow prodigy, seemingly a nice guy, to whom Willow is pledged in a strategically arranged marriage; and Toby, a shape-shifting “mimic” prodigy who shares the protagonist’s background, values, and a psychic link. Oh, there are other suitors—enough to cast a Japanese anime-fantasy series written by Tolstoy—not to mention a whole insurgent army and “guardians” from another dimension looking to exploit Willow (when the Core isn’t trying to manipulate her). The captivating hero plays a dangerous game with all of them, secretly set on freeing an old friend, now a condemned prisoner. Much of the engaging story’s vibe is familiar, female-fronted, YA dystopia material—the chosen one is faced with a universe of impossible boyfriend and family problems. While progress throughout the saga is slow and intricately detailed, each character manages to have a singular voice. The action scenes, when they finally arrive, will keep readers addicted to turning the pages. Since this book is a third chapter, newcomers will be badly lost without maps.
A deep dive into recognizable SF territory that’s made compelling by rich characterizations and details.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73444-417-9
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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