An inventive premise and easy-to-root-for characters make this a series opener genre fans will enjoy.
The afterlife’s warring realms compete for an important girl’s soul.
Tenley has grown up rich and privileged, but she’s refused to sign a contract with Myriad, the Everlife realm to which her parents have signed and which has provided her family with wealth in the Firstlife and assurances of comfort after death. That refusal causes her to be sent to a brutal asylum to be tortured until she changes her mind. Both Myriad (“Might Equals Right!”) and the other realm, Troika (“Light Brings Sight!”), believe Tenley could be the key to ending their eternal war. Each sends a Laborer to persuade her to finally sign; Troika’s is Archer, an impulsive wisecracker with a heart of gold, and Myriad sends bad boy Killian to seduce her. Archer and Killian have a shared history, and they hate each other; cue snark. If she dies without signing, neither realm gets her, and her spirit is sent to a third, mysterious realm rumored to be terrible. The imminent war—and attempts to kill her—might force her to choose. The story is told in a mix of Tenley’s present-tense narration and brief, frequently funny dispatches to and from Archer and Killian. Complicated worldbuilding occasionally disrupts with less-than-graceful exposition. The ending screams sequel.
An inventive premise and easy-to-root-for characters make this a series opener genre fans will enjoy. (Fantasy. 13 & up)Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-373-21157-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Another engaging entry in this world of spies and international intrigue.
Pop superstar Winter Young is again drawn into the world of secret agent Sydney Cossette in this follow-up to Stars and Smoke (2023).
Though constantly on one another’s minds, Winter and Sydney have resisted making any contact with each other since narrowly surviving a mission in which Panacea, the secret organization Sydney works for, tapped Winter to use his megastar status to infiltrate a wealthy and powerful criminal underworld. Ratcheting up the tension in this enemies-to-lovers romantic thriller is the fact that Sydney is being sent to Singapore to extract Tems, a fellow agent who also happens to be her ex. Winter, who needs a plus-one for a Warcross Championship gala in order to better maintain his cover, invites his former girlfriend. Witty insults and crossed signals abound in the pair’s smoldering relationship, but this second installment is a bit darker than the first. If some of the betrayals and losses involved are easy enough to spot coming, they still pack an emotional punch due to the strong development of Winter’s and Sydney’s respective backstories, told in alternating third-person narratives, both involving abuse and psychological pain. Winter is Chinese American; Sydney is white, and there’s a diverse cast of supporting characters whom readers will likely see again—Lu has left the ending tantalizingly open for another installment.
Another engaging entry in this world of spies and international intrigue. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781250852915
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come.
A heady blend of courtly double-crossing, Faerie lore, and toxic attraction swirls together in the sequel to The Cruel Prince (2018).
Five months after engineering a coup, human teen Jude is starting to feel the strain of secretly controlling King Cardan and running his Faerie kingdom. Jude’s self-loathing and anger at the traumatic events of her childhood (her Faerie “dad” killed her parents, and Faerie is not a particularly easy place even for the best-adjusted human) drive her ambition, which is tempered by her desire to make the world she loves and hates a little fairer. Much of the story revolves around plotting (the Queen of the Undersea wants the throne; Jude’s Faerie father wants power; Jude’s twin, Taryn, wants her Faerie betrothed by her side), but the underlying tension—sexual and political—between Jude and Cardan also takes some unexpected twists. Black’s writing is both contemporary and classic; her world is, at this point, intensely well-realized, so that some plot twists seem almost inevitable. Faerie is a strange place where immortal, multihued, multiformed denizens can’t lie but can twist everything; Jude—who can lie—is an outlier, and her first-person, present-tense narration reveals more than she would choose. With curly dark brown hair, Jude and Taryn are never identified by race in human terms.
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come. (map) (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31035-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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