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
A love letter to imagination, adventure, the written word, and the power of many kinds of love.
An independent young girl finds a blue door in a field and glimpses another world, nudging her onto a path of discovery, destiny, empowerment, and love.
Set at the turn of the 20th century, Harrow's debut novel centers on January Scaller, who grows up under the watchful eye of the wealthy Cornelius Locke, who employs her father, Julian, to travel the globe in search of odd objects and valuable treasures to pad his collection, housed in a sprawling Vermont mansion. January appears to have a charmed childhood but is stifled by the high-society old boy’s club of Mr. Locke and his friends, who treat her as a curiosity—a mixed-race girl with a precocious streak, forced into elaborate outfits and docile behavior for the annual society gatherings. When she's 17, her father seemingly disappears, and January finds a book that will change her life forever. With her motley crew of allies—Samuel, the grocer’s son; Jane, the Kenyan woman sent by Julian to be January’s companion; and Bad, her faithful dog—January embarks on an adventure that will lead her to discover secrets about Mr. Locke, the world and its hidden doorways, and her own family. Harrow employs the image of the door (“Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges”) as well as the metaphor (a “geometry of absence”) to great effect. Similes and vivid imagery adorn nearly every page like glittering garlands. While some stereotypes are present, such as the depiction of East African women as pantherlike, the book has a diverse cast of characters and a strong woman lead. This portal fantasy doesn’t shy away from racism, classism, and sexism, which helps it succeed as an interesting story.
A love letter to imagination, adventure, the written word, and the power of many kinds of love.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-42199-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Redhook/Orbit
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A smart fantasy thriller that deftly mingles the paranormal with the bureaucratic and mundane.
An undercover agent gets drawn into a paranormal murder investigation involving the British royal family that tests her personal loyalties and her own extraordinary abilities.
Alexandra Dennis-Palmer-Hudson-Gilmore-Garnsey, also known as the 12th Lady Mondegreen, never asked to join the Checquy Group, a secret government agency that protects British national interests from supernatural threats. When she was a child, her parents allowed the Checquy to take Alix and help develop her signature gift—the ability to energetically shatter bones—so she could become a Pawn, a special operative. Since Alix grew up close to the royal family and had occasionally worked as a bodyguard for them, it seemed only natural to appoint her as lady-in-waiting to her childhood friend Princess Louise after the mysterious death of her brother Edmund, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. Alix’s job with the Checquy Group has suddenly become far more difficult: Not only is she now tasked with actively protecting Louise as the next British monarch but she’s also investigating Edmund’s demise as a supernatural murder. Clever, complex, and fast-paced, this fantasy thriller’s greatest strength is the imaginatively crafted world in which events take place. Everything is possible here in the alternative universe O’Malley creates, including characters who routinely defy all empirical laws by turning into trees and stegosauruses and unusual modes of death involving energetically implanted brain cubes. The occasional borrowed tiara on her head, Alix moves through an environment where nothing is ever quite what it seems. The closer she comes to finding Edmund’s killer, the more Alix uncovers about the secrets surrounding her position within both the Checquy Group and the royal family.
A smart fantasy thriller that deftly mingles the paranormal with the bureaucratic and mundane.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780316568104
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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