Vivid characters animate a faraway world featuring romance, magic, and tangled pasts.
In Gregorsdóttir’s debut fantasy, a woman hopes to reunite with her love after decades of imprisonment.
A century in the shadowlands of the Duskhold is a grueling sentence. A woman there has forgotten her birth name and also can’t recall what transgression begat this punishment—just that she, a human, had fallen in love with a Fae. She’s finally so distraught that she walks into the Whispering Sea, convinced that a fatal drowning is her only chance at reprieve. Instead of dying, she’s somehow “remade,” and, amazingly, she travels to another realm altogether. There, a couple shows her kindness and gives her the name Lyra. But she wastes little time before heading east to the Fae realm, where she’s certain her lost love resides, and she auditions to be a performer at the Amber Palace. Lyra can manipulate shadows and can even turn them into forceful energy, courtesy of “lingering traces of Fae enchantment” in the Whispering Sea. She passes herself off as a mere illusionist, however, and quickly befriends Lysara, the court historian. But it’s the prince who truly captures Lyra’s attention—and she captures his as well. Is he the Fae whom she loved so long ago? She’ll have to be cautious if she wants answers, or a chance at rekindling the romance, because Prince Torian is currently betrothed. And, as Lyra soon discovers, something is hunting her—a daunting presence that may have the inclination and the power to pull her right back into the shadowlands.
Gregorsdóttir’s tale, which kicks off a prospective series, boasts a consistently compelling protagonist. She begins as a tortured soul with a curiously murky past before she bravely travels to an unknown (or possibly forgotten) destination despite the danger involved. As the story continues, readers learn much more about Lyra, including details about her family. The supporting cast also shines, including Lysara and the seemingly conflicted Torian, as well as Tomas and Elidra, who “monitor crossings between realms.” There’s a pleasing variety among the characters, including smaller winged faeries, an antlered forest spirit, and nods to the godly Four Pillars. (Lyra apparently resembles most Fae, although references to her distinguishing human feature of “curved ears” are abundant.) Lyra’s journey in this first installment effectively fuses genre elements of romance and suspense. She longs for what she once had, and she does, on occasion, find herself in intimate situations—including a few moments that outright sizzle. At the same time, she perpetually fears that someone from the court might recognize her Fae magic, or that the aforementioned ominous presence will make itself known to her. Gregorsdóttir’s prose is pleasingly poetic, whether describing scenes of love or magic-wielding: “I opened my hand again, skin still stinging. Red crescents bit into my flesh, encircling tiny scorches, perfect black pinpricks edged in feverish pink. The stars had left their mark before dying, branding me with their last betrayed sigh.” A twist of fate near the end will most certainly leave some readers shaken—and hoping for a sequel.
Vivid characters animate a faraway world featuring romance, magic, and tangled pasts.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9798994188514
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Astral Queen Press
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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