A stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed kind of read—a virtually unputdownable adventure fantasy.
The second installment of Logan’s Last Legacy saga, following The Silverblood Promise (2024), continues the chronicles of Lukan Gardova, a disgraced heir attempting to solve a mystery revolving around his father’s death.
With a key that opens a vault at a bank located in the city of Korslakov—in the far north of the Old Empire—that should contain insights into his father’s demise, Gardova sets off on the grand adventure with master thief Ashra (aka Lady Midnight) and Flea, a “sharp-tongued street rat” who is deadly with a crossbow. But once they reach their destination, Gardova gets drunk and has the jeweled key stolen from him by an infamous thief known as the Rook. Highly irritated by their companion’s bonehead mistake, Ashra and Flea—along with a contrite Gardova—vow to locate the Rook and somehow retrieve the key. Their mission, however, is beset with many perilous side quests, all of which seem to be tied to noble houses attempting to open an ancient portal called the Crimson Door in the side of a mountain left behind by a godlike race. Behind the door could be advances beyond their wildest dreams, or that could annihilate them all. While no novel is flawless, this comes close. Deeply developed and authentic characters (even the supporting cast are adeptly portrayed), nonstop action, immersive worldbuilding, and a plethora of cool fantasy elements (golems, ghouls, rogue alchemists, mythical beasts, sentient swords, and more) make this an undeniable page-turner. Logan achieves this readability in no small part by savvily ending chapters with bombshell revelations, powerful statements, and leading sentences like this one, which will all but compel fantasy fans to keep reading: “And with a terrible slowness, the door began to open.”
A stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed kind of read—a virtually unputdownable adventure fantasy.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250350657
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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