An experimental, psychological debut about selfhood, fiction, and memory.
A former scholar searches for a missing woman in an unorthodox way.
In Dennis’ elusive debut novel, Elena—a young woman grieving her late mother—finds herself in the pages of a missing woman’s journal. Still traumatized by her mother’s death six years ago, Elena is plagued with memory loss and a slippery sense of self: “Forgetting is how the body keeps itself sane.” When Siobhán, her late mother’s friend, reaches out with an unconventional job offer, Elena moves to Paris, leaving behind her graduate program and long-term boyfriend. Siobhán wants Elena to find Ella, her biological daughter, who fled to Thailand when her adoptive parents told her the truth about her birth—and has been missing for the past six years. Craving closure, she asks Elena to rewrite Ella’s impressionistic journals "as an account of what happened" and use that narrative to unearth clues that may be hidden in plain sight. Physically and emotionally unmoored for years, Elena loses herself in the task almost immediately: “The difference now is purpose—one to string itself through my days, adding tautness, definition, orienting them on an axis of someone else.” If the journal rewriting is an interesting (if convoluted) premise, Dennis’ sensory prose leads to a fascinating exploration of identity, grief, and time. As Ella’s journals tip further toward madness, the two women’s lives become more intertwined; the physical, mental, and emotional boundaries between them become nearly nonexistent. Dennis’ abilities to blur fact and fiction—through structure and pronoun use—and wield language elevate the novel. Her prose is sensory and unsettling: “three days, ample and round, like peaches ripening in the summer markets”; “I was becoming other than myself, to my delight and terror.” With an unsurprising (though satisfying) ending, the women come to terms with their lives—the ones they currently inhabit and the one Elena has created.
An experimental, psychological debut about selfhood, fiction, and memory.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-942658-76-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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
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
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