Absolutely blonkers; giddiness-inducing for the most open-minded of readers.
Family secrets give way to a madcap marathon portal fantasy.
Tasked with cataloging his dead hoarder grandfather’s mansion’s contents, 16-year-old recently orphaned naturalist Jonathan also puzzles over his grandfather’s nonsensical instructions. Strange and dangerous things lead Jonathan to conclude his grandfather was murdered—a conclusion reached too late to prevent school friends Rack and his good-natured, athletic sister, Danny, from arriving to help. Meanwhile, on parallel world Aurora, Aleister Crowley, aided by his grotesque familiar, Wretch, and the head of Napoleon, is the Lord Emperor of the Franco-Germanic Empire, seeking to conquer Prague (with mecha-elephants) and England (by attacking the wall on the land bridge—a wall whose defenders wear cod-head–shaped codpieces—with a doomsday earthworm-dreadnought devised by Jules Verne for use against H.G. Wells). As the mansion has doors between worlds, the Earth gang (with Jonathan theorized to be special) decides to help the Order of the Third Door against Crowley to prevent the war’s reaching Earth. Aurora’s an enthusiastic hodgepodge of antique fantasy elements (talking animals), touches of cosmic horror, clever wordplay, genre deconstruction, and butt humor, all tied together with a just-go-with-it fever-dream logic. Constant viewpoint jumps (including a MacGuffin-turned-narrator) slow down the already meandering, tangent-heavy, complicated (spies spying spies) story’s pace but allow for savoring weirdness until the cliffhanger ending. Jonathan and Danny seem to be White; Jonathan is asexual and Danny is bisexual. Danish Korean adoptee Rack uses a prosthetic leg.
Absolutely blonkers; giddiness-inducing for the most open-minded of readers. (Fantasy. 12-adult)Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-30886-5
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.
A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife—and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water—they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. Verdant spores explode into fast-growing vines if they get wet, which means inhaling them can be deadly. Crimson and midnight spores are worse. Ships protected by spore-killing silver sail these seas, and it’s Tress’ quest to find a ship and somehow persuade its crew to carry her to a place no ships want to go, to rescue a person nobody cares about but her. Luckily, Tress is kindhearted, resourceful, and curious—which also makes her an appealing heroine. Along her journey, Tress encounters a talking rat, a crew of reluctant pirates, and plenty of danger. Her story is narrated by an unusual cabin boy with a sharp wit. (About one duke, he says, “He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”) The overall effect is not unlike The Princess Bride, which Sanderson cites as an inspiration.
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250899651
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
A wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach.
A shapeshifting monster finds love with a human whose family hopes to exterminate her kind in this mix of fantasy, horror, and romance.
Shesheshen’s yearly hibernation is interrupted when a group of monster hunters disrupts the makeshift nest she’s made in the bowels of a ruined manor. She typically takes the form of an amorphous blob, but quick thinking leads her to construct a more humanoid appearance to trick the nosy hunters. Her hard work, constructing a new body from the remains of past feasts, isn’t convincing enough, and she’s driven off a cliff to her death. Her saving grace comes in the form of Homily, who nurses Shesheshen back to health, fully believing the alien creature is simply a young woman just like her. Homily’s nurturing ministrations cause Shesheshen to feel something foreign to her: love. However, Shesheshen begins to realize that her version of love doesn’t quite align with the very human Homily’s. Shesheshen wants to be honest with Homily and reveal her true form, until Homily confides that she’s a monster hunter of sorts, determined to seek revenge on a shapeshifter who cursed her family. In the realm of monster romances, Shesheshen is quite physically different from the typical humanoid love interests. For example, the book’s title is a direct reflection of the way Shesheshen initially wants to communicate her affection for Homily: by injecting the woman with her eggs until the young hatch and inevitably eat her from the inside. Shesheshen makes for an interesting narrator, as readers experience these new feelings and sensations right along with her. Seeing her find ways to describe and parse new emotions like friendship and love is often more interesting than the romance itself. Referring to this merely as both an opposites-attract and a secret-enemies-to-lovers romance doesn’t quite encapsulate the bizarro narrative that debut novelist Wiswell has created. While inventive enough to push the boundaries of romance and dark fantasy, this may appeal mainly to niche genre-fiction fans.
A wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780756418854
Page Count: 320
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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