A fast-paced fantasy adventure in which an Elven warrior comes to question everything about her world.
An Elven commander faces a new war in this first installment of Smith’s fantasy series.
As the story opens, 50 years have passed since the great Elven warrior Selenna and her allies fought and routed the forces of the Necromancer and brought peace to the land of Belissia—and 50 years since both Selenna and the Necromancer vanished in the course of their final confrontation (no bodies were found). The Elves are long-lived beings, most with some kind of mastery over the “five elements” of mancery (including Aquamancy, Electromancy, and Pyromancy). Others, called Truthseers, are trained in the art of mind-reading, and a tiny handful of Elven Inquisitors have the rare ability to shift between the dimension of Belissia and the mysterious Shadow Realm. As the book’s main action begins, Selenna’s daughter Selouteau is the captain of an airship in the Elven Armada when violence again threatens Belissia. After a massive force of Humans invades and establishes a beachhead on Belissia, Selouteau is tasked with shoring up the Elven position in the coming conflict by making overtures to Ezell, the self-exiled prince of the Ez people. At her side on this mission will be young Ensign Perch, a Truthseer who’s far more than he seems. The situation is likewise more complex than it looks: Ever since the Necromancer’s War, ruling Elven factions have been high-handed toward and dismissive of the Ez and other groups they call “Lesser Races”—a fact that the invading Human Alliance, under the cultlike control of a “Divine-King,” is only happy to exploit. Selouteau’s orders are “to gain allies, not start another war,” but long before the fast-paced action of the book’s climax arrives, readers will know that another war is inevitable.
Smith’s prose is occasionally verbose and overdramatic (“The words hit Selouteau like a physical blow,” reads one passage; “her head swam, and her mind reeled”), and the author sometimes gives his characters groan-worthy dialogue (“If I ever see your ugly, scarred face again, it will be the last thing you remember,” snarls Ezell after a barroom brawl, adding, “ever”). But he has an unfailing knack for conveying gripping action scenes, and, despite the fact that the various sorceries give his Elven characters (particularly Selouteau herself) the equivalent of comic book superpowers, Smith manages to invest confrontations with the feeling of real tension and stakes. By far the book’s most fascinating element is its steady thread of subversion: Readers will instinctively like Selouteau, but they’ll quickly wonder if they’re rooting for the wrong side. The Human Alliance might initially seem boorish and malevolent, but by the time Prince Ezell speaks about “the curfews and mandatory camps imposed by the Elves during the war” that resulted in “tens of thousands of deaths,” readers will be looking at Selouteau and the other Elves in a harsher light, which is refreshing to find in a supernatural epic. This is first-rate fantasy in the Tolkien vein, with future volumes sure to deepen the story.
A fast-paced fantasy adventure in which an Elven warrior comes to question everything about her world.Pub Date: June 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781923163690
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Clark & MacKay
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2024
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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