An engaging, fablelike warning about climate change with a gentler approach than most eco–SF.
A family’s new home comes with an uncanny book apparently from the future, a memoir of sorts that tells of a coming environmental cataclysm and the peaceful world built by the few survivors.
Kellner, an artist, illustrates as well as annotates her debut SF novel, yet another cautionary tale in the cli-fi category. The Denzells purchase a vanished person’s furnished home on the condition that they retain its contents—resident cat, Plato; many books; and “unusual collections and strange artifacts left behind by the old man.” One book begins to reappear around the house with strange, insistent regularity, a bound volume supposedly from the future called The History of the World, bearing a publication date of 2200. Various family members in turn are caught up in reading the oddity, which claims to be the transcribed memories of surviving individuals starting in “The Time Before”—that is, before mid-21st-century global warming wiped out millions of species, eliminated crops, and turned Earth into myriad storm-wracked, overheated wastelands. In the Pacific, one little girl watches as everyone around her succumbs to blight and starvation. Her sole-survivor tale intertwines with the odyssey of Gabriel Thomason and Mia Lu, a presumably North American young couple who, as modern civilization collapses, take their chances at sea in a sailboat. Poetic imagery and song rather than disaster-movie violent mayhem move the engrossing narrative along with a sometimes-idyllic tone poignantly in contrast to the background of apocalyptic events. Hanging over the whole thing is the question mark (the customary shape in which Plato holds his tail) of whether the future really has to be this way. The intriguing story is not as shrill and angry as like-minded narratives in this alarm-bell genre (though it still makes its points) and is pitched to readers of a YA and older demographic. Kellner follows the loosely plotted book with considerable aftermatter documents bearing out her philosophies—everything from a wishful “Imagined Universal Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” to the United States Constitution (in total, even the part about guns), the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a little-remembered “Treaty for the Renunciation of War” from 1928 (“Oops,” readers will be tempted to say).
An engaging, fablelike warning about climate change with a gentler approach than most eco–SF. ("Imagined Universal Bill of Rights and Responsibilities", discussion questions, Appendix of Documents (United States Constitution, US Constitution Bill of Rights, Amendments to the US Constitution, Treaty for the Renunciation of War, United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Parliament of World's Religions "Commitment to the Sustainability and Care of the Earth"), Acknowledgments, interview with the author, other books from the same imprint, About the publisher) (science fiction)Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68463-123-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2022
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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