Among the payoffs are plenty of cliffhangers, including one that nicely ushers in the next volume—which fans will await...
Sprawling first installment of a promised quartet involving the usual elements of swords and sorcery but with surprising and pleasing twists.
New Zealand–based YA author Hair spends a great deal of time here worldbuilding, and the fantastic geography that he conjures is both captivating and improbable. Not least of its disbelief-suspending features is a bridge that rises from the depths of the sea every dozen years, allowing the power- and wealth-seeking Magi to mount crusades in the land across the water. Naturally, the residents of that land don’t cotton to the incursions. Neither does every resident of the invading power, whose political complexities are both Byzantine and Mandarin. The Moontide Bridge that adjoins Yuros and Antiopia, some reckon, is the chief cause of their world’s miseries. In its sometimes-pedantic explorations of the racial, class and religious differences that separate the two continents, Hair’s novel swerves into J. K. Rowling territory, while in its mystical geography and anthropology, it often recalls Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. By comparison with these two models, Hair often lays on the fantasy-speak a little thickly: “Most of us have greater aptitude at one or more of the four Classes of the gnosis....My element is fire and I am strongest in Thaumaturgy and hermetic-gnosis.” Yet, as the novel unfolds and Hair charts both its physical features and its actors, bearing such resonant names as Antonin Meiros, Belonius Vult, Gurvon Gyle, Ramita Ankesharan and Cymbellea di Regia, it gathers both speed and force. Hair is adept at building characters as well as worlds, and his attention to his female players is welcome in a genre that too often excludes them. The tangles of place names and walk-ons require concentration on the reader’s part, but in the end, the story is satisfying enough to make the effort worthwhile.
Among the payoffs are plenty of cliffhangers, including one that nicely ushers in the next volume—which fans will await eagerly.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62365-014-8
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Jo Fletcher/Quercus
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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