An entertaining romp, blending stylish storytelling and creepy carnage.
Supernatural husband-and-wife detectives—he’s a vampire, she’s a werewolf—take down paranormal perps in this rollicking horror fantasy.
Goodridge’s yarn opens in 1914, when New York police detective Madison Cavendish teams up with clairvoyant milliner Seneca Sue SunMountain (the police commissioner’s wife swears by her prophetic visions) to investigate the disappearance of a Broadway singer. Their encounter with the prime suspect, a tentacled, magenta-colored monster from the cosmic void, gets them killed and then reborn as vamp and lycanthrope, blessed with immortality, super-strength, and a primal bloodlust that they rein in with hyssop-oil tea; cementing their bond is their shared experience as light-skinned Black people passing as white in a racist society. After forming a private detective agency, their cases include a series of attacks by a were-hyena, which may implicate novelist Zora Neale Hurston and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance; a magic box containing a dangerous Persian demon that’s desperately sought by New York’s occult circles; and a vicious “blue devil dog” terrorizing West Virginia. Later chapters set in the 1960s and 70s feel grittier: Madison fights in Vietnam, where he slaughters dozens of Vietcong soldiers and spies a strange woman who hovers in the air and feasts on the corpses of the men he killed. The author sets a vivid, teeming fictive world of oddball characters and lurid creatures against an atmospheric portrait of Black New York and Harlem from their Jazz Age glory to the bleak 1970s era of heroin and street crime. With its juxtaposition of Madison and Sue’s usually affectionate banter and monster-of-the-month adventures, the novel often feels like a mash-up of The Thin Man and Ghostbusters. Goodridge’s elegant prose alternates between the jauntily picaresque and darker, gorier vibes when Madison and Sue unleash their beastly natures (“Sue, crouched over Octavius on hands and knees, ripped at his neck to the point of separating the poor soul’s head from the rest of his body”). The result is good, scary fun.
An entertaining romp, blending stylish storytelling and creepy carnage.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781957224411
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Current Words Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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