Emotional battles are more compelling than world-ending stakes in this tonally uneven fantasy debut.
An assassin and a scholar both seek a lost magical dark Art as war threatens their respective homes.
Known for cozy mysteries like Dial A for Aunties (2021), Sutanto makes her epic fantasy debut with a book that’s considerably darker than the rest of her work. Dual storylines take place a world apart: In the northern continent, Mara is a softhearted assassin in training at the isolated mountain fortress Tchu-Morrokhai. Forbidden from forming relationships with fellow acolytes—though she does have an unrequited love for her brilliant, brutal best friend, Lia—Mara extracts magical Art from her surroundings, hoarding Artifices for battle. The southern city of Velingard is the center of science and higher thinking, only 20 years rebuilt following an uprising that supposedly ended the noble Revven bloodline. Alivya Bellevue, daughter of the scientist whose alloy adtheriu hastened the revolution, studies the occult history of demons and Art, only to get caught up in a Revven conspiracy. Looming over all is the adther-powered Divine Empress of Kazgarth, whose bloody conquering spree draws ever nearer. Some of Sutanto’s humor is out of place in this grimdark setting, while other sequences are incongruously violent. Tantalizing clues are briskly delivered, so any revelations land more like inevitable plot machinations. The two storylines’ eventual convergence will not surprise readers anticipating the connection between Mara and Livya, cemented by an initiation, a kidnapping, a prophecy, and another revolution. Sutanto’s worldbuilding is strongest in the fraught relationships between various pairs, from assassins’ contradictory loyalties to the symbiotic bond between Livya and Cerra, her Sectator (indentured lifetime companion). Both dynamics raise provocative questions about who is soft, who is subservient, who is secondary—sparks that will hopefully ignite in the duology’s conclusion.
Emotional battles are more compelling than world-ending stakes in this tonally uneven fantasy debut.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780063455368
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
