Slender but still well-crafted and satisfying.
Sisterhood, love, and magic blossom in this timely tale of protest based on a historical incident.
In mid-19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts, the “mill girls” spin the thread and weave the cloth in the textile factories, all to the profit of the “Boston gentlemen” who own the mills where they work and the boardinghouses where they live. But when those very same gentlemen decide to raise the young women’s rent by a quarter a week, the women decide it’s time they had a say in their living and working conditions. Fierce Judith Whittier organizes the workers into a union and ensures their loyalty to the cause—and specifically, to their planned strike at the mills—with the help of her friend Hannah Pickering, a gentle and sickly Seer who bends her untrained magic into a spell that uses a lock of every woman’s hair to literally weave all of them into solidarity. Now the union members are magically compelled to maintain the strike, but what will they do when the mill owners’ agent, the hardhearted Mr. Boott, brings in new and more desperate workers to take the strikers’ places at the factories? As Judith and Hannah seek a magical solution to their cause, they both gradually realize that what they feel for one another is more than mere friendship. A feel-good message of a marginalized community battling amoral, exploitative capitalists might seem a bit obvious, but it also feels empowering during these uncertain times, when so many are still effectively disenfranchised. If the story has a flaw, it’s that it might’ve been richer with a higher page count and more development. The battle between the union and the establishment could have spawned additional twists and turns, more magic spells. Some more character development would also have been welcome; we learn a certain amount of Hannah’s history, but we learn very little about Judith’s backstory and even less about the other mill girls’.
Slender but still well-crafted and satisfying.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-75656-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.
A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife—and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water—they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. Verdant spores explode into fast-growing vines if they get wet, which means inhaling them can be deadly. Crimson and midnight spores are worse. Ships protected by spore-killing silver sail these seas, and it’s Tress’ quest to find a ship and somehow persuade its crew to carry her to a place no ships want to go, to rescue a person nobody cares about but her. Luckily, Tress is kindhearted, resourceful, and curious—which also makes her an appealing heroine. Along her journey, Tress encounters a talking rat, a crew of reluctant pirates, and plenty of danger. Her story is narrated by an unusual cabin boy with a sharp wit. (About one duke, he says, “He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”) The overall effect is not unlike The Princess Bride, which Sanderson cites as an inspiration.
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250899651
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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