A wondrous collection of rarely predictable, alluringly inscrutable fables.
Yourdon renders the familiar strange in this collection of offbeat fables.
A farmer discovers a bottomless hole on his property, into which his neighbors soon begin tossing their unwanted possessions. A glassmaker creates a glass heart for a girl in need of a new one, but its fragility proves a danger when she begins to fall in love. A woman gives birth to a teacup, much to the bafflement and disappointment of her husband: “instead of a son or daughter there was a new cup on the drying board. Many people visited in the following days, some family, some curiosity-seekers. They asked the husband questions he couldn’t answer. Would the teacup grow? Could the visitors drink from it?” In these 60 fables (none of which are more than a few pages long), Yourdon offers tastes of the fantastical: a horse small enough to get caught in a spiderweb, a gourd filled with geese, a man capable of turning a dog into a violin. There’s a magic darning bag in which anything—or nearly anything—is mended; a girl who keeps finding gifts under her pillow, including feathers and human teeth; and a milliner who attempts to sell a “glut” of out-of-fashion hats, only to discover the “glut” has come to life. Many of the fables play with the meanings people ascribe to inanimate objects. In one story, a man complains so much about his wife’s new chandelier that she decides to murder him with it. In another, a grandfather refuses to use the new indoor bathroom, preferring to stick with the outhouse, until he discovers a miniature carved wooden version of himself placed without explanation on the outhouse shelf. The best fables are those that take unexpected turns, like the particularly dark “The Gallows,” about three siblings’ ill-fated trip to a fair. Yourdon has a knack for crafting scenarios that trouble readers’ senses of cause and effect—there are no transparent morals here—in just such a way to ensure they will immediately proceed to the next one.
A wondrous collection of rarely predictable, alluringly inscrutable fables.Pub Date: March 9, 2026
ISBN: 9798989483518
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Northport Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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