A delight for fans of fantasy and action adventures.
After a young girl and boy are magically transported to another world, they must unlock its secrets while contending with an evil group bent on destruction.
Ethan Fox randomly meets Haley Hunt while enjoying a day at an amusement park with his parents. However, when he and Haley go off exploring the beach, they’re suddenly teleported to a magical land. They’re greeted by an interesting cast of characters and creatures, most importantly Daavic and his mother, headmistress Jordanna Ravenwood. Jordanna explains that they are Caretakers who watch over Earth to ensure that its inhabitants aren’t harmed by such creatures as vamprils and hell giants. The Caretakers work against the Grimleavers, who are led by a man who killed Jordanna’s father-in-law after betraying him. Jordanna’s other son, Damien, purportedly killed his own father and abducted his sister, Danielle. Once Jordanna sees Haley, however, she contemplates the curious resemblance between Haley and her lost daughter. Ethan and Haley explore the world, starting with the mysterious Moongarden and its secret wishing well. Trouble strikes when they visit different lands, including the Silent Forest and Kracken Island, to help the Caretakers thwart attacks and kidnappings by Grimleavers. Through these journeys and more, Ethan uses his power to conjure words on the pages of a blank book—poems that hint at clues to help in dire situations. Ethan and Haley make a cute, energetic and formidable duo, as they try to make their way through a familiar yet foreign world while aiding their new friends. The blending mythologies can be confusing in this alternate universe that’s also sometimes overwhelmed by an array of characters. At its heart, this story colorfully portrays a family once betrayed but now slowly putting itself back together.
A delight for fans of fantasy and action adventures.Pub Date: March 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1884573255
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Fox Hunt Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2012
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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