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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.
A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife—and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water—they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. Verdant spores explode into fast-growing vines if they get wet, which means inhaling them can be deadly. Crimson and midnight spores are worse. Ships protected by spore-killing silver sail these seas, and it’s Tress’ quest to find a ship and somehow persuade its crew to carry her to a place no ships want to go, to rescue a person nobody cares about but her. Luckily, Tress is kindhearted, resourceful, and curious—which also makes her an appealing heroine. Along her journey, Tress encounters a talking rat, a crew of reluctant pirates, and plenty of danger. Her story is narrated by an unusual cabin boy with a sharp wit. (About one duke, he says, “He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”) The overall effect is not unlike The Princess Bride, which Sanderson cites as an inspiration.
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250899651
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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