A well-constructed and enjoyable conclusion.
In the conclusion to the Emily Wilde trilogy, a Cambridge professor of dryadology—faerie studies—prepares to live her research as never before.
Previously, in Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (2024), Emily poisoned Queen Arna, the usurping stepmother of her faerie-prince fiance, Wendell Bambleby, and found a gate to Wendell’s lost kingdom; naturally, the process of establishing a new monarchy in a quixotic faerie realm will be far from smooth. Unfortunately, Arna is not quite dead; she is using her poisoned, liminal state to blight the very landscape. Emily must employ her specific mortal skills (academic research and unrelenting resolve) to find the faerie lore that best describes their current situation, picking out the clues within scraps of old tales to locate the hidden, dying queen, and deal with her in a way that doesn’t lead to further damage. Although much of what she learns is grim, Emily forges on, determined to discover the path to a happy ending for herself and Wendell, where she can be the faerie queen she never imagined she’d be (and is frankly quite uncomfortable being). Thankfully, this concluding volume isn’t the feared retread of the previous two, both of which involved Emily’s research in remote European locations and her efforts to get on with the human locals, even while her obvious neurospiciness and deep understanding of rules allow her to deal with faeries more effectively than most mortals can. This installment makes effective callbacks to the previous two, while moving the story forward as Emily, despite the concerns of her mortal friends, tries to make a place for herself in a dangerous new world where not all of her subjects are prepared to take her seriously. Janet of Carterhaugh merely had to drag her lover Tam Lin from a horse to secure her happiness from a vengeful faerie queen; Emily has to put in real work, using her brain and plunging into physical danger to earn her future. The result is far more satisfying and believable, despite being mainly set in a fantastical world.
A well-constructed and enjoyable conclusion.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593500224
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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