A whimsical and ultimately touching story of love and the afterlife.
A grieving widow goes on a serious of otherworldly adventures in Croop’s debut novel.
Adalyn believes she’s finally found love with a man named Matthew when the Covid-19 pandemic strikes; after a brief illness, Matthew dies. Shortly afterward, Adalyn sits on a neighborhood park bench and complains to the Creator she’s always worshipped: “God, I love you, but how could you do this to me?” she asks. “How could you when you know I’ve suffered enough?” And surprisingly, she gets an answer: “God has His reasons.” The speaker is Lenny, an angel and former ghost whom Adalyn already knows. Through their conversations, Croop ably fleshes out an elaborate fantasy cosmology, loosely based on aspects of Christianity. Lenny recently broke up with Matthew’s guardian angel, Melanie, who’s applied to Heaven’s Rebirth Application Offices to be reborn as a mortal; he saw Adalyn grieving from heaven’s watchtower and decided to offer her comfort. He takes her by the hand and brings her to the “ghost train,” complete with a conductor, which will take her to heaven; there, she’s issued an one-day pass to look for Matthew and spend a bit more time with him. In the process, she gets involved with her guardian angel, Maurice, and his real-world adventures back on Earth. Over the course of this novel, Croop relates Adalyn’s adventures and inner thoughts with a good deal of warmth and approachability. The characters are thinly conceived but uniformly fun, and the plotline involving Maurice and the thugs who threaten his legacy makes for engaging reading. Along the way, the author sometimes turns religious concepts like heaven and angels into fodder for humor: “It was common knowledge that the ringing of a bell meant an angel got its wings….it was possible to simply buy wings in heaven. I suppose it all made sense since the cash register bell rang after every purchase.”
A whimsical and ultimately touching story of love and the afterlife.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-956074-72-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Global Summit House
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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