An impressive and confident tale of two women finding love in a realm of shape-shifters.
In this fantasy debut, two shape-shifters form a bond that may change their world.
As Noon’s sprawling novel opens, readers find a mysterious woman named Aurora skulking through a mine that’s crawling with poisonous spiders. She’s hunting for valuable ethian crystals when she’s brought up short by the last thing she expects to encounter in such a dark, forbidding place: a beautiful song. Tracing the tune to its source, Aurora is enraged to find a cutter’s den: “A place of unimaginable horror, where shapeshifters were imprisoned while their bodies were systematically harvested for the high price their parts fetched on the black market.” Aurora lives in Nordarra, a region populated by many different, scattered clans of shape-shifters—mer-people, tiger-shifters, wolf-shifters, and avians, who can grow enormous wings out of their backs. These beings are presumably the descendants of the folks who came to Nordarra from the human world and were taught magic that allowed them to transform into shape-shifters. (Another theory is that those first human visitors were the servants of Nordarra’s original inhabitants and interbred with them.) In this realm, avians are frequently characterized as untrustworthy. It gives Aurora pause to discover that the song in the mine comes from a captive avian named Evie, but the two form a wary partnership. In exchange for Aurora’s dealing with the mine’s guards, Evie will fly them both to freedom. When Evie is injured and rendered temporarily flightless during their escape, the two are thrown into a close, earthbound struggle to survive—and to fulfill Aurora’s primal vow to track down all the parts of her father’s tiger form that were harvested by cutters years ago.
Noon handles the gradual unfolding of the story’s plots and subplots with a remarkably sure hand. Virtually none of debut novelists’ typical mistakes—clunky dialogue, incomplete concepts, and especially great blocks of undigested exposition—crop up in this book’s 500-plus pages. The political interplay of Nordarra’s various clans and factions is intelligently rendered as a backdrop for the tale’s central, most touching thread: Aurora’s and Evie’s (in reality, Evangeline Aquilar, oldest child of a powerful avian leader) gradually easing their personal and cultural barriers as their necessity-born friendship deepens into something more. The author has a straightforward, unadorned way of showing her characters clearly to readers, and it’s genuinely involving to watch Aurora overcome the lessons of her traumatic childhood in order to feel tender emotions again. The two women’s ongoing discovery of each other’s attributes is the story’s highlight. “You’re quite extraordinary and a little scary,” Aurora tells Evie at one point. “You’re like a kitten that looks all sweet and cuddly but you have sharp claws. Remind me never to cross you.” There are stretches in the narrative where Noon’s vivid personal revelation scenes almost overshadow the other pieces of the multifaceted plot structure, but these episodes are infrequent. The various levels of drama are usually kept in a balance that’s expertly maintained right through to the exciting (albeit, predictable) climactic scenes. The world of Nordarra—and the mechanics and psychology of shape-shifting—is drawn with an appealing intricacy that will make readers hope to return to this setting in future novels.
An impressive and confident tale of two women finding love in a realm of shape-shifters.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-473-50513-4
Page Count: 543
Publisher: Bluefire Books Ltd.
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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 smart and highly original work of modern fantasy.
After the events of Book of Night (2022), Charlie Hall is forced to hunt down the perpetrator of a terrible massacre.
Charlie Hall is the Hierophant: It’s her job to be tethered to a powerful, independent shadow—a “Blight”— and hunt down other Blights for the Cabals, the heads of their respective shadow-magic specialties. The Cabals use the difficult job of Hierophant as a punishment, but Charlie agreed to take it on so she could be the person tethered to Vince, aka Red, the Blight who posed as a human and ended up dating and falling in love with Charlie. The Cabal leaders used magic to steal the part of Red’s memory that contained his relationship with Charlie, and so Charlie is determined to steal Red’s memories back. And she needs to move fast, because if Red doesn’t remember loving her, he just might be OK with Charlie being killed if it means his own freedom. Meanwhile, Mr. Punch, a terrifying Cabal leader who specializes in using shadow magic to possess other people’s bodies, has a job for Charlie: He wants her to find the culprit behind a terrible massacre that was attributed to a cult. He suspects that the people were actually killed by a Blight, and he doesn’t want the Cabals to face the blowback if the truth becomes public. Mr. Punch could do terrible things to Charlie if she fails, but if she succeeds, he’ll help Charlie and Red be free of the Cabals for good. The sophomore novel in a series is always tough, but this sequel proves that the second book can be even better than the first. Black turns the screws on the magical world she set up in Book 1, creating complicated political motives between Charlie and the Cabal leaders and making the question of what it means for a shadow, like Red, to have their own consciousness more interesting. Veteran con artist Charlie makes some truly brilliant moves, especially toward the end, where the last few chapters have one terrific surprise after the other.
A smart and highly original work of modern fantasy.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781250812223
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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