A great start to a fantasy duology featuring well-developed characters and settings.
The fates of a warrior princess and a royal guard entangle in Solomon’s series-starting romantic fantasy novel.
Cecelia is eldest child of King Filip of the Archipelago of the Moons and the presumed heir to the kingdom, despite that fact that her mother is not the queen. She always felt like an outsider in her own family, especially as she doesn’t know the truth regarding her late mother’s identity. She was brought up to be a fierce warrior and a brilliant strategist, so when her father, who has visions, tells her to travel with her brother to the kingdom of Korith to investigate a looming threat, she accepts her mission—even when he tells her she’ll likely never return home. Viktor is the kinsguard of Korith’s young monarch, and a remarkably skilled fighter who’s killed many men during his service. He’s assigned the role of bodyguard to visiting princess Cecelia and her young sibling. Viktor’s frustration increases when he becomes romantically infatuated with Cecelia. Despite their mutual attraction, the pair find themselves unwillingly thrown together by an arranged marriageand caught in the middle of a chaotic political plot and popular rebellion. As their newly formed bond is tested, Cecelia and Viktor come to realize there are plenty of secrets hidden in Korith’s history. Solomon’s first entry in the Dual Moons duology features chapters that focus alternately on Cecelia and Viktor, which is an effective narrative strategy. They ably introduce the two complex main characters as they both struggle with questions of identity and duty, as well as their romantic feelings for each other: “Fragile hearts…need tender care,” Cecelia whispers to Viktor at one point. “Your loneliness can keep mine company.” Their love story builds in an intricately developed fictional world; the story delves into religion and politics, examining the oppression of a people and the lengths to which people will go to gain power. The author also makes the intriguing choice to separate the characters with two road trips to explore the internal dynamics of a frayed kingdom.
A great start to a fantasy duology featuring well-developed characters and settings.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 979-8987942017
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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