A brilliantly imagined and transportive collection of surreal bedtime stories.
A writer conjures tales in response to an artist’s surreal images in this collaboration by Golden and Owens.
A girl who was born mid-flight—not on a plane, but to a winged mother—can never sit still but instead feels compelled to swim constantly through the air in the story “The Itinerant.” In “The Mainer,” a shipwrecked cabin boy is swallowed by a whale, only to have a strange sense of déjà vu. A princess, in “The Sister,” demands her servants make her a doll replica of the twin she absorbed in the womb, while her old brother communicates with the ghost of the subsumed twin to plot revenge. In these fabulist micro-fictions, Owens introduces readers to such otherworldly characters as the Town Crier, the Mischief Maker, the Lunar King, and the Handmaiden. Each is inspired by the accompanying portrait made by artist Golden, whose surreal visages evoke rich personalities and vast worlds. The Scout, for example, has a spotted, river-stone-shaped head of midnight blue, wearing a crown reminiscent of fingerling potatoes, held up by a neck that might have been made for an ornate porcelain vase. “The Scout floats suspended at the center of The Constant Sphere,” begins Owens’ accompanying story, “gazing into a seamless 360 degree spinning cyclorama of the heavens crafted by winged innocents.” Golden’s images are arresting: The textures suggest analog sensibilities of an earlier era, and while there’s rarely a traditional face to be found, there’s always the suggestion of a thoroughly human countenance. They’re complemented by Owens’ dark, dreamy fairy tales in the tradition of Russell Edson, Donald Barthelme, and Lydia Davis. Just as Golden’s collages bring together disparate materials, Owens’ stories take a number of different forms and voices, each one resetting readers’ expectations for what a story might be. The final character, the Storyteller, reveals that he works in a “story bank, ever echoing with tens of thousands of nearly subaudible voices constantly murmuring….” These murmurings effectively follow readers through the book—and may do so for quite a while afterward.
A brilliantly imagined and transportive collection of surreal bedtime stories.Pub Date: April 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781736516768
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Animal Heart Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
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
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