A historically fantastic adventure as mysterious and tumultuous as the sea itself.
Rodman presents an epic triangular tale involving real-life engineer Isambard Brunel and famous fictional figures Captain Nemo and John Ahab.
The SS Great Eastern—an idea first conceived in 1851 by the renowned (and real-life) English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel—is a ship unlike any other. “Six times greater than any craft,” the Great Eastern is more like a “floating city” than a simple vessel, and at the heart of it is Brunel and a small team of men. Between the construction of a larger-than-life ship and the impending implementation of the transatlantic cable—a wire that joins Europe to the Americas “by strands of lightning under water”—the modern world looms larger than ever. But in 1859, an explosion rocks the Great Eastern and kills eight of Brunel’s men; when the smoke clears, the flinty engineer is nowhere to be found. This is the moment when Brunel’s story of technological triumph morphs into a sweeping international adventure in which he’s caught between two of the greatest fictional figures of the sea: Captain Nemo, “a man who lives beneath the sea, and hates all upon it,” and John Ahab, who “lives upon the waves and hates, with equal fervor, all beneath.” Ahab is recruited to save the transatlantic cable; Nemo vows to destroy it. Rodman’s yarn is equal parts historical and fantastical, thrilling and thoughtful. The author has researched his subject matter, both fictional and nonfictional, with such careful consideration that the story as a whole is a vivid, evocative account of a timeless adventure. His characterizations, particularly of Nemo and Ahab, remain true to their source material yet somehow are authentically original; the ways in which the two men orbit each other begs the audience to ask why this collision of classic personalities has never happened before. On top of a seamless plot and rapid yet contemplative pace, Rodman’s prose is lyrical, technical, and all-engrossing. The journey of Ahab, Nemo, and Brunel already reads like a timeless classic, to be enjoyed by lovers of history and great literature.
A historically fantastic adventure as mysterious and tumultuous as the sea itself.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781644285541
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
