An old-fashioned ghost story told with inventiveness and style.
A tormented medium takes on a difficult case in this supernatural novel.
In 1920s Los Angeles, the spiritualist movement is in full swing. Parents and widows of soldiers who died in World War I are still looking for closure, and medium Letitia Hawking is there to deliver it. Letitia uses her “scrying bowl” to view the deathbed moments of the deceased, offering accounts of their final thoughts to the bereaved and bringing them the peace she cannot find for herself. She wears a black veil during her readings to increase the sense of mystery—and to hide her identity from anyone who might recognize her from her past in London. When she’s approached by the wealthy lawyer Alasdair Driscoll about a case involving his still living young niece, Finola, the medium initially declines. Driscoll wants Letitia to sign a confidentiality agreement before they begin, and she can sense a shadow looming behind him. “She didn’t need the Driscolls’ ghosts,” she thinks. “She had enough of her own.” Then Letitia learns just what’s wrong with Finola: The girl is haunted by phantoms, and if she isn’t helped, she will end up in an asylum. Letitia takes pity on the girl—whose condition has much in common with the medium’s own—and begins to have feelings for Driscoll as well. But can Letitia help the living without someone ending up dead? Dawson’s prose is measured and suspenseful as she slowly unspools the tale: “Finola’s breathing was labored, her eyes twitching beneath her lids and forehead clammy, with threads of auburn hair sticking to her skin….There was no darkness attached to the girl, though the room’s low light gave too many shadows for Letitia’s liking. Ever wary of self-protection, she took hesitant footsteps closer.” The author is adept at selling not only the novel’s supernatural elements, but the historical era as well. She takes her time building the characters and the world around them, which pays dividends once the really spooky stuff starts to happen. Like all good ghost stories, the true horrors aren’t entirely spectral: The characters are haunted by personal traumas and secrets as frightening as any spirit.
An old-fashioned ghost story told with inventiveness and style.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-942856-88-7
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Literary Wanderlust
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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