An accomplished and well-written tale leaving readers eager to keep exploring this intriguing world.
A former soldier must confront her past and the despotic plutocrat she once served in this fantasy.
Timon, a priest of the god Taraki in Penderyn, raises a foundling he names Piper. A wild girl, Piper keeps running away to the city and eventually stays there, making a modest living with odd jobs and begging. In the wealthy quarter, Piper jumps a mansion’s fence and is challenged by its owner, Dahlia Tulan. Dahlia is the city’s guildmaster—fabulously wealthy, powerful, and ruthless—and though she intends to kill the trespasser, Piper fights back valiantly. The guildmaster instead adopts the girl, renaming her Silbrey, and has her trained as a cold, brutal enforcer. But Silbrey discovers her heart when she falls in love with Callis, a handsome shepherd in the marketplace. Disguising her violent past from him, Silbrey gets permission from Dahlia to leave the city with him. But there’s a catch: Neither can ever return. Years later, Silbrey doesn’t know how to tell her daughter and husband they mustn’t go to Penderyn market. When they do, disaster strikes, bringing Silbrey back to the city, where she will not only face off against Dahlia, but also deal with her true self. In his series opener, Hopkins writes graceful and sinewy prose that vividly describes action, emotion, and inner life. His thoughtful, captivating worldbuilding is less socially hidebound than that of many fantasy sagas, as with Silbrey’s attraction “to men, to women, and to people who didn’t fit into these crude categories.” An open-content scheme means other writers may use Hopkins’ setting and its rich ground for storytelling. Debut illustrator Decena contributes lovely, intricately crosshatched monochrome pictures that capture the book’s atmosphere.
An accomplished and well-written tale leaving readers eager to keep exploring this intriguing world.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 65
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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