A gritty and fast-moving fantasy from a promising new voice.
A debut epic fantasy follows two unlikely allies who fight to find the tools to forestall doomsday.
As Dillon’s novel opens, the lands of Maetlynd and Taldreas and other territories are still fragmented. They are reeling from a great conflict called the Reckoning, in which the powerful, mystical objects known as Tears were scattered so they could never fall into the wrong hands again. As the story begins, a man named Harglon, who before the Reckoning had been part of an order whose members used mystic Runestones to augment their physical powers, has been tortured and transformed into a relentless killer. He and his men track down Alevist, a former knight of the Nine Runes, and brutally murder his wife and family. The tragedy is so bitter that it seems to turn Alevist into a different person. “The paragon his mother had spoken of wouldn’t have done that,” thinks a character of Alevist after hearing an unsavory account about the former knight. “The paragon from the stories told in the early days of his time as a Kaledar—he wouldn’t do that.” Harglon and Alevist had clashed prior to the Reckoning. Now, the two find themselves on opposite sides again, this time in a growing conflict that pulls in the rest of Dillon’s cast, primarily Erevayn, a man wounded by his own tragedy when readers first meet him hunting fugitives. Later, he allies himself with Alevist. “So much of the history was filled with deceit and manipulation, but also sacrifice,” Erevayn realizes at one point. “So much of what he had learned, now revealed to be false.”
In the book’s “About the Author” section, a mention is made that some of Dillon’s writing influences include Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series and Joe Abercrombie (presumably his First Law trilogy). Readers familiar with those authors will see them all over this fast-paced series opener. The usual trappings of epic fantasy are present—maps, glossaries, etc.—but they’re amply augmented by some of the hallmarks of grimdark fantasy, including bouts of gory violence and the liberal deployment of expletives. The characters wield magic in a world of supernatural beings, but most of them sound distinctly contemporary in language and attitude. The novel is also characterized by a great deal of the cynical nihilism that fills the books of the author’s storytelling predecessors. Dillon takes the risk of front-loading his narrative with the intricate vocabulary and proper names of his story, and despite the presence of glossaries at the front and back of the novel, this gamble doesn’t entirely pay off. Readers unfamiliar with the shotgun-style worldbuilding of the Dungeon Master’s Guide may find themselves swamped by the tale’s arcane terminology. But the author usually overcomes this lack of punchy exposition by keeping readers hooked the old-fashioned way, with well-developed characters and smoothly realized dialogue. Alevist dominates the bulk of the story so completely that it’s fortunate he’s drawn as compellingly as he is, a deeply wounded man who’s nonetheless emotionally honest. But even the tale’s main villain, Harglon, often manages to be more than a simple, one-dimensional bad guy. In his first novel, Dillon accomplishes the crucial feat of making his readers want to move on to his next book.
A gritty and fast-moving fantasy from a promising new voice.Pub Date: July 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798218665876
Page Count: 531
Publisher: LightSeeker Media
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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