An imaginative and entertaining, if underedited and salacious, sex-and-sorcery romp.
A witch’s persecution of her stepdaughters leaves ample opportunity for dalliances in this fantasy/romance.
Following The Scarlett Mark (2020), this second installment of Lane’s A Reign of Blood and Magic series finds the sorceress Cynara presiding over the Kingdom of Velez, where she’s hated by everyone, including her son, King Lowell. She’s known as The Ebony Queen because of her mainly black wardrobe and blacker heart. Craving more dark power, she meets with the fallen angel Daemonis, who promises to help her with a mega-spell that will precipitate Ragnarök and gifts her immediately with the power to cause storms in distant places. She deploys tempests against the three stepdaughters who have fled to far-flung lands to escape her wrath. Princess Rose gets swept overboard during a storm at sea and is saved by studly pirate Edwin Perrow. Princess Scarlett, happily engaged to Lord Nicolai Graydon, gets engulfed by a sand tornado that only abates when the war god Odin gallops across the sky to her rescue atop his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir. Princess Ruby and her handsome guardian Garrett Morris endure the worst ordeal after a snowstorm drives them into a cave that Cynara seals shut with lightning. A dayslong slog through a tunnel takes them to a shallow pool that they have to wade through, leaving them no alternative except to get naked and fall into each other’s arms. Meanwhile, back in Velez, Sister Mary Margaret (who is the princesses’ mother, Regana, in disguise) and the Lord Chancellor take time out from plotting against Cynara to have sex in church. And Cynara takes time out from witchery to fondle the manhood of her stable groom. Lane’s romantic fantasia is a talkfest with dialogue that’s sometimes tart and punchy (“You lie once, I take your tongue. Twice, you lose your arm”) but often overripe (“I’d plunder your lips right now, causing them to swell with desire, and I wouldn’t stop pillaging your lift until my rudder—”) or indecipherable (“The battle cry doesn’t spy her last breath until the soldier accepts his final mark”). Still, Cynara makes a compelling villain—a scene where she ferrets the truth out of Mary Margaret has a chilling ruthlessness—and the otherworldly effects are vivid and well rendered in this energetic tale.
An imaginative and entertaining, if underedited and salacious, sex-and-sorcery romp.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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