Fascinating worldbuilding with a strong and surprising feminist twist.
A gothic historical romantasy that takes place in an imaginary North American coastal region and features frontier-esque hardships, feminist concepts, and truly frightening supernatural creatures.
When you grow up in a town named Mistaken, things don’t always go as planned. Greer Mackenzie is 27 and more than ready for this year’s Hunt, a kind of 18th-century Sadie Hawkins Day in which Mistaken’s unmarried people find future mates. Greer and her longtime beau, Ellis Beaufort, heir to the local bakery, can’t wait for their marriage. Unfortunately, Greer’s father, Hessel Mackenzie, owner of the lucrative lumber mill, has other plans—and, unbeknownst to Greer, so does Ellis. There’s hardscrabble survival aplenty, whether it’s Greer’s friend Louise catching rabbits for her underserved family’s stew or Greer heading off beyond the town’s Warding Stones with a canvas sack containing deer jerky, hand-knit socks, and other provisions to keep her safe in the land of the Bright-Eyed and the Gathered. The Bright-Eyed turn out to be shape-shifting, blood-sucking beasts; the Gathered an isolated group of zombified survivors. No one seems to fully understand this new world, even if the Bright-Eyed have managed to instill fear in both Indigenous people and European settlers. Toward the end, Greer learns more about the origin of the Bright-Eyed. She’s told they’re ruled by a queen who was "intrigued by the idea of a new world, a new continent to see, to explore, to feast upon. She had an insatiable hunger for more." Unfortunately, Greer’s story and the background information on Mistaken take so long to tell that once the violence and battles for the souls of humans versus demons begin, it’s difficult to remember that at one point the novel centered on the cruel inequality women in early colonial societies faced. Instead, the action turns to teeth, talons, and turncoats, with an intriguing but strangely unsatisfying strand about how evil came to the shores of a land so bounteous and yet unexplored.
Fascinating worldbuilding with a strong and surprising feminist twist.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593686805
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
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
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