A peculiar but often profound piece of metafiction whose emotional landscape offers more riches than its physical one.
What appears to be a typical children’s quest fantasy is more than it seems.
In Seanan McGuire’s Hugo-nominated Middlegame, the early-20th-century alchemist Asphodel Baker uses the pen name A. Deborah Baker to write a series of children’s books concealing coded messages to other radical alchemists. Now McGuire has taken on the Baker pen name and actually written the first book. Tangle-haired, adventurous Zib and obsessively tidy, rule-following Avery both climb over a mysterious wall and find themselves in the Up-and-Under, a dangerous and magical land populated by monsters, Crow Girls, giant talking owls, and other fabulous creatures. Their way home lies along the gleaming, elusive, improbable road to the Impossible City, where the Queen of Wands will surely be able to send them home…if the other kings and queens weren’t so determined to strew obstacles in their way. The plot draws heavily on the tropes of a stock 20th-century children’s fantasy, but the sharp and thoughtful perspective of the narrator transforms the book into a 21st-century commentary on such works. It also puts forth a deeply felt and carefully considered exploration of the foolish myths adults teach the next generation and the unpleasant consequences of parents trying to force their offspring to fit into a mold, with an emphasis on the negative effect on those children’s relationships with their peers. These themes link the book to the author’s Wayward Children portal fantasy series, which touches on similar issues. Middlegame readers searching for hidden alchemical meaning may not find it beyond the obvious naming of the Kings and Queens of the Up-and-Under after court cards in the tarot (often linked to alchemy). Selections from the text included in Middlegame also appear, but the author’s history in that novel doesn’t quite match up with what’s presented here. Middlegame places Baker as a contemporary of L. Frank Baum and her books as commercial and alchemical rivals with Baum’s Oz series. But numerous bits of context and reference within this children’s fantasy (planned suburban communities, a woman working in a street repair crew, playgrounds with slides, etc.) place it considerably later than the dawn of the 20th century. Surely that is a deliberate choice on McGuire’s part, but what does it portend?
A peculiar but often profound piece of metafiction whose emotional landscape offers more riches than its physical one. (Fantasy)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9927-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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