Watching Paris burn is oddly sentimental, and the heroine has teeth, but by the end, it’s all just too exhausting.
In Reid’s debut horror novel, an unstable young woman gets in touch with her inner survivor—at the expense of the entire human population.
Jeanie has come to Paris with her best friend, Ben, to celebrate the New Year and a new beginning. She's mourning the recent death of her father and hopes her French friends will help her move on and embrace life. Instead, at midnight, the power goes out, and by morning, Paris is engulfed in a fiery apocalypse. Jeanie and her friends fight their way through the city trying to find salvation, along the way adopting an orphaned newborn who gives them hope and the strength to survive not only earthquakes, but also the mysterious moribund, undead vampiric creatures who feed on both emotions and human flesh. Reid makes liberal use of the end-of-chapter cliffhanger, and the novel moves compellingly at first, driven by the mystery of both the creatures and the origin of the devastation as well as graphic descriptions of Paris in flames. Ultimately, however, the story loses momentum and human interest. Reid’s thematic insistence on “fate” feels instead like “boredom” as each character meets his or her expected end. The end-of-world imagery (rising temperatures, etc.) and monster creepiness cancel each other out.
Watching Paris burn is oddly sentimental, and the heroine has teeth, but by the end, it’s all just too exhausting.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7314-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon451
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Solid and absorbing but not the tour de force the Powder Mage trilogy was.
Conclusion to McClellan’s Gods of Blood and Powder fantasy trilogy (Wrath of Empire, 2018, etc.), in which politicking assumes as much importance as magic and armies.
Dynize blood sorcerer Ka-Sedial intends to secure the three ancient monoliths known as godstones in order to make himself into a god, and he invades Fatrasta to capture two of them. Giant warrior Ben Styke, accompanied by Ka-Poel, the mute bone-eye sorcerer (and Ka-Sedial's grandaughter) whose magic can detect the stones, plans to attack Dynize and locate the third godstone. But a storm scatters Styke and Ka-Poel's ships and strands them with only 20 lancers. Worse, the stone is already under Ka-Sedial's control, forcing them to forgo brute force and attempt diplomacy. Ka-Poel's husband, Taniel, despite his near godlike powers, spends most of the book trying to catch up with them. Gen. Vlora Flint, grievously wounded and bereft of her gunpowder magic, burns for revenge yet must engage more Dynize armies and endure political interference. Ex-spy Michel Bravis and Ka-Poel's sister Ichtracia, a Privileged sorcerer, try to learn why so many Palo are mysteriously disappearing. McClellan tells an intriguing tale. Still, alert readers will wonder why the book's villain, having quickly solved his main problem, then does nothing for hundreds of pages and why many of the characters that add salt and spice to the proceedings spend too long offstage or just form wallpaper. True, the author doesn't do politics nearly as effectively as he does magic and battles, and he wrings out few surprising plot twists. His prior novels, with their hero Field Marshal Tamas, cast an unfortunately deep shadow: Tamas is one of the great fantasy heroes of recent years, and nobody here comes close.
Solid and absorbing but not the tour de force the Powder Mage trilogy was.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-40731-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
An entertaining novel that does not neglect the vitality of its story while probing society’s assumptions.
The HSS Matilda is a massive spaceship that has carried a small contingent of humanity for many years away from a destroyed Earth and toward a hazy vision of a promised land.
Over generations, the ship’s decks have become harshly segregated by race and prosperity, and the corrupt leadership of the upper decks has imposed increasingly cruel rules, restrictions, and forced labor on the darker-skinned residents of the lower decks. Aster is an angry and strange young woman of the lower decks who struggles with deeply rooted anger and sadness but also provides medical care to her shipmates with great skill and compassion. When the ship’s sovereign falls ill and Aster’s friend and mentor, the Surgeon General Theo Smith—a member of the leadership class—asks for her help with his treatment, Aster finds herself thrown into the investigation of a personal mystery that is deeply entwined with the fate of the ship. A seemingly inexplicable link between the sovereign’s illness and her mother’s suicide 25 years earlier sends Aster on a dangerous search for answers that threatens to upend her understanding of herself, fuel an uprising, and open up the never imagined possibility of escape. Solomon’s characters are solid and easily likable, even when their more abrasive qualities and lack of self-reflection add exasperating misunderstandings to the plot. The HSS Matilda is a well-crafted world, and while the tyrannical regime of its leadership feels like a familiar dystopic trope, the diversity of the people who inhabit it—their various sexual and gender identities, physical abilities, and psychological burdens—is refreshingly visible and vital even as they face brutal discrimination for their differences.
An entertaining novel that does not neglect the vitality of its story while probing society’s assumptions.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61775-588-0
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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