Scalding prose takes readers from gritty warfare to an engaging fantasy romp.
An American soldier gets transported from the Vietnam War to a magical realm in this debut fantasy.
It’s 1969, and Clyde Robbins is headed for Vietnam. He ships out as a staff sergeant after officer training, ending up at the Long Binh Army base. The horrors of war quickly become real for him when he shoots a 16-year-old Vietnamese girl who sneaks a grenade onto the base. Later, Clyde is haunted by the death of Claude Thibodeaux, a young soldier killed by a napalm strike. Clyde’s own life ends in a firefight with Vietnamese combatants. But he wakes in a place that “tasted like Vietnam with all its shadows” but is somehow different. A woman’s voice in his head says, “Arise. You are not safe here.” Clyde leaves a burial field and proceeds to the nearby woods. He meets a German Luftwaffe pilot named Jens Grüber, who welcomes him to Irgendwo, a place that collects dead warriors throughout history. In the Citadel District of Mora, Clyde is jailed by the Council under the suspicion of being a shadebringer, one capable of breaking the rule of Lord Ek Maraine. Will Clyde help defeat the dark forces of the goddess Mother Daedrina or shrug off yet another war that’s been foisted on him? Hooper, an Iraq War veteran, creates a viscerally absorbing introduction to a fantasy series. While crawling in the Vietnamese jungle, Clyde describes it as wearing “a thick wool blanket dunked in a pond of leeches and duck shit.” The cynicism of the era is also captured when Clyde tells Claude early on: “You’re gonna die here, boy.” The Vietnam narrative is so nightmarish that the subsequent fantasy can’t help but feel like a rollicking adventure by comparison. Irgendwo is filled with soulless Hollow children, necromancers like the alluring Miriam, and a hauntingly familiar man named Do. Despite being sick of fighting other people’s wars, Clyde finds the inspiration to help the people of Junedale, whose slippery morals echo those of the military that trained him. This opening volume ends on a warm note, highlighting an indefatigable optimism.
Scalding prose takes readers from gritty warfare to an engaging fantasy romp.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63299-468-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
The series’ snarky noir vibe might be dwindling, but there’s something of substance in its place.
This is wizard Harry Dresden’s yearlong mourning period for Karrin Murphy, the woman he loved.
If you keep upping your protagonist’s powers throughout a series, then you must balance the scales by increasing the number and strength of their enemies—as well as seriously messing with their personal life. Over the course of the Dresden Files, Harry Dresden, Chicago PI and now one of the most powerful wizards in the world, thought his first love was dead (she wasn’t), sacrificed his half-vampire girlfriend on an altar to save their child, lost another girlfriend when they learned she’d been mind-controlled into their relationship, bound himself into servitude as the Fae Queen Mab’s Winter Knight, and, for the length of an entire book, thought he himself was dead (he wasn’t). But nothing has hit quite as hard as the death of Karrin Murphy, the former police lieutenant who was his quasi-partner, friend, and, after a slow burn across many books, lover. Chicago is in a terrible state following a battle with Ethniu the Titan and her Fomor army, and Harry is doing his best to confront the monsters, dark magic, and anti-supernatural prejudice running wild amid the slowly rebuilding city. He’s also trying to save his half brother Thomas from two different death sentences, train a new apprentice, and juggle a relationship with Thomas’ half sister Lara, the dangerously seductive vampire Queen Mab is forcing him to marry. But he’s doing all this while nearly crushed by grief that threatens his judgment and disturbs his control over his magical powers. Butcher really makes you feel the dark, depressive state Harry exists in as well as the effect it’s having on his friends. Despite all that happens in it, this book is a pause as well as a setup for the series’ planned conclusion, an epic conflict with the eldritch creatures known as “the Outsiders.” It’s a tough, redemptive pause that could be a real drag, but thankfully, it’s not, because Butcher shows balance, too: Even as the crises pile up, so do the help and goodwill from unexpected sources.
The series’ snarky noir vibe might be dwindling, but there’s something of substance in its place.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593199336
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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