Strong messages about female empowerment permeate an inventive fantasy waiting for its conclusion.
In the second volume of the Shamra trilogy, Dara must learn who she is and where her people came from if she plans to confront the Chaos that threatens her people.
After defeating the Trocs in Curse of the Shamra, the first volume of The Shamra Chronicles, child hero Dara returns to assess the damage and prepare for her next battle against her greatest foe yet. But, despite the previous novel’s momentum, she must first learn about her people, the Shamra, their struggles and how they came to leave their homeland. Briana, who had appeared in Dara’s dreams, relates the lengthy history of the Shamra people as the two girls evade their enemies in a game of cat-and-mouse. Two hundred years ago, the Shamra were enslaved by the Kimra; Dara’s ancestor Drea led the rebellion to overthrow them. In a prescient move after the Pyrrhic victory, the priest, farmer and artisan clans fled the land in search of safer realms. But the fierce hunter clan, led by Drea, stayed, although a core group of hunters traveled with the priest-led refugees to ensure that their true history was not lost. The refugees suffered under the priests’ demands for female subservience—a pervasive issue in the saga—while Drea struggled with in-fighting and betrayal among her clan. As new generations mature, a pattern of misogyny and disloyalty develops in the Shamra people, with recurrent themes of the burden of leadership, the thrill of the hunt and the general unreliability of males. The repetition grows tiresome. Eventually, the Shamra discover that their immorality is not innate—it’s the working of Chaos, a force that infiltrates societies and destroys them from within. Dara’s ancestors defeated and temporarily contained Chaos, but now it threatens to break loose and corrupt the Sharma yet again. Being the middle book of the trilogy, this volume contains mostly backstory with no attempt at conclusion, which wouldn’t disappoint if its presentation weren’t so muddled. Fans of the first volume and readers looking for another realm to explore will enjoy the world-building, but they’ll have to wait until the series’ next volume to see if Dara truly is the savior she’s prophesized to be.
Strong messages about female empowerment permeate an inventive fantasy waiting for its conclusion.Pub Date: May 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1934267165
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Edge Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter.
After a Nigerian British girl goes off to an exclusive boarding school that seems to prey on less-privileged students, she discovers there might be some truth behind an urban legend.
Ife Adebola joins the Urban Achievers scholarship program at pricey, high-pressure Nithercott School, arriving shortly after a student called Leon mysteriously disappeared. Gossip says he’s a victim of the glowing-eyed Changing Man who targets the lonely, leaving them changed. Ife doesn’t believe in the myth, but amid the stresses of Nithercott’s competitive, privileged, majority-white environment, where she is constantly reminded of her state school background, she does miss her friends and family. When Malika, a fellow Black scholarship student, disappears and then returns, acting strangely devoid of personality, Ife worries the Changing Man is real—and that she’s next. Ife joins forces with classmate Bijal and Benny, Leon’s younger brother, to uncover the truth about who the Changing Man is and what he wants. Culminating in a detailed, gory, and extended climactic battle, this verbose thriller tempts readers with a nefarious mystery involving racial and class-based violence but never quite lives up to its potential and peters out thematically by its explosive finale. However, this debut offers highly visually evocative and eerie descriptions of characters and events and will appeal to fans of creature horror, social commentary, and dark academia.
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250868138
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An exciting and bittersweet ending to a compelling duology.
The gang gets back together after the catastrophic events of A Tempest of Tea (2024).
Arthie Casimir and her brother, Jin, managed to uncover the real identity of—and steal a ledger with incriminating evidence about—the Ram, monarch of Ettenia, but their crew, a mix of vampires and humans, is irrevocably changed. The revelation of a secret leads to a rift between the siblings, the Ram is still in power, and now humans are going missing, with blame unjustly falling on the vampires. To take down the colonizer of her birth country, Arthie must get everyone to work together again, travel back to her homeland of Ceylan, and pull off her most daring heists yet. With chapters alternating among the perspectives of Arthie, Jin, and Felicity “Flick” Linden—a skilled forger and Jin’s love interest—this genre mashup set in an intricate fantasy world combines exciting action and adventure, heartfelt romance, and complex paranormal beings, all while feeling relevant to real-world issues. The trio of non-white leads face racial prejudice among other hardships in a society that constantly underestimates them. The plot takes a little while to really get started, but once the action amps up, there are plenty of tense and impassioned moments. The ending satisfyingly wraps up the main conflicts and is sure to evoke a strong emotional response from invested readers.
An exciting and bittersweet ending to a compelling duology. (map) (Fantasy. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780374389420
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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