A bit of a slog and a bit of a downer, but essential for Elphaba fans.
It’s not easy being green, as this prequel to Maguire’s Wicked series amply shows.
Everyone has parents, but few are as flawed as those who brought Elphaba—Elphie, here—into the world. Pop is an emotionally unavailable missionary from Munchkinland, working among the poor Quadling laborers of Wend Hardings, “sheep-shit country.” Mom often keeps a breast exposed, hopeful of catching the attention of someone, anyone, who’ll pay attention to her: “A need to be seen. By men.” It being a standard trope of children’s literature that daughters must live without their mothers, mom has to check out fairly early in the proceedings, leaving Elphie to take care of her armless—so we are frequently reminded—sister and a brother who’s a bundle of misdirected energy. There’s not much love in evidence, and of course the absence of love is an essential ingredient in the recipe for producing evil people. In Maguire’s telling, Elphie, who “makes wishes on falling stars still,” begs for our sympathy, but then does something just awful enough—for example, picking viciously on poor armless Nessa—to lose it. Elphie’s need for connection is met, at least in some small part, by her relationship to animals: She’s gifted in communicating with “polter-Monkey[s]” and dwarf bears, whom Maguire, nodding to current headlines, calls “migrants on the run.” Indeed, a subtle political undercurrent runs throughout, with Elphie searching for connection with a wise Indigenous man who “went off to the imperialists to tell their military to stop sending troops to build that highway of yellow steps.” Not much happens in Maguire’s talky pages, certainly as compared to the previous Wicked books, but he’s constructing a psychological backstory that prepares the way for Elphie/Elphaba’s turn to the dark side. “Hurt can distend rationality,” he writes, and that’s just so.
A bit of a slog and a bit of a downer, but essential for Elphaba fans.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780063377011
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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