An entertaining sex romp sprinkled with sword-and-sorcery pixie dust.
A woman beset by four gorgeous, magical princes enjoys them all in this rollicking fantasy romance.
Rylee Gray, a downtrodden Ashlander in the kingdom of Lumathyst, infiltrates the royal palace to snoop for information on her missing sister, Erin, by attending the Choosing, a masked ball at which a woman is selected to be the collective mate of the Legends of Chaos, the realm’s four princes. Rylee hates royalty and is dismayed when she herself is chosen, which contractually obligates her to have sex with the Legends; but her dismay ebbs when she beholds their handsome faces, splendid physiques, and beguiling powers. There’s nice-guy Kal, who can fly; earthy horndog Axl, who controls the sea; suave brainiac Pierce, who reads minds; and, most tantalizing of all, brooding bad-boy Jax, dubbed the Nightmare for his wolfish grin and ability to emotionally manipulate people into feeling terrified. To assess compatibility, Rylee spends a month at each Legend’s estate getting to know him personally and carnally, and, for good measure, she helps fight a rebel group called the Faders. But she worries that she will be executed if it’s discovered that she’s an Ashlander as well as a “demi” with the power to control wind; both conditions disqualify her from matehood. She also fends off Jax’s cruel father, King Baydel, who vacillates between trying to rape her and wanting to kill her. Rylee’s courage, compassion, and erotic adventurousness soon has the Legends—even prickly, sardonic Jax—eating out of her hands. She then faces a final hurdle to becoming their official mate: the Athanry, a ritual that will make her immortal—if she survives it. Presley’s sketchily developed fictive world is full of contrivances designed mainly to set up Rylee’s lavish, graphically detailed sex scenes, which include spanking, bondage, disembodied mental sex, group sex, and floating-up-in-the-sky sex. Fortunately, her punchy prose conveys it all with elegant characterizations—“She was a jagged diamond of indifference in a sea of attention-seeking wealth”—and horny verve. (“He’s so damn tall, with bronze skin over tons of muscle, and his energy is just as large. It’s a marvel there’s space enough for him in this room; it makes me wonder what else about him might be big.”) Rylee’s mix of public feistiness and bedroom submissiveness to her buff suitors will keep readers stimulated.
An entertaining sex romp sprinkled with sword-and-sorcery pixie dust.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781649377524
Page Count: -
Publisher: Entangled: Red Tower Books
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
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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