A clever and finely wrought steampunk tale about aliens and misfits.
Źymbalist tells the story of two Martian girls attempting to get home in this debut steampunk novel.
In 1903, in three towns in Maine, three misfits’ lives are about to intersect. There is Emmylou, a young, clubfooted Martian girl who had been visiting Maine with her aunt only to have the woman fly away in their rocket ship, stranding Emmylou and her sister among the suspicious residents of Blue Hill (“What if the villagers somehow recognized them?” Emmylou muses. “If someone had noticed the rocket ship, then the villagers would be out and about looking for Martians”). There is Giacomo Venable, the self-published author of Sir Pilgarlic Guthrie’s Phantasy Retrospectacle and, in some ways, a self-loathing failure. There is Rory Slocum, a young boy who gets grief for always having his head in books, dreaming of life on Mars. Struggling to escape from the pressures of their respective situations, the characters drift forward in parallel threads, even as they move toward the ultimate goal of trying to help Emmylou and her sister escape the prejudicial society of Earth and return safely home. In the background is the constant, haunting song of the otherworldly Oceanides, the mysterious and maligned sea nymphs whose voices can be heard by only those that they have targeted for madness. Źymbalist writes in a lovely, highly descriptive prose that luxuriates in the details and curios of his setting: “The brimstone moths would be fluttering all about the command hub, each one fiddling with the many buttons and electrodes by which to work the technology of anti-matter propulsion...all of them nibbling on gowns of Martian mohair and felted wool.” The plot hits all the requisite steampunk notes—flying machines, Pinkertons, H.G. Wells—even if the pacing is lackadaisical. Though epic in structure (over 750 pages), the novel turns out to be ultimately reserved in its ambitions. It never fully delivers on the space-opera flourishes mentioned in the first chapter (Martian vulcanology, Venutian conquest); most of the book takes place in a Maine only marginally more exotic than the real state. That said, the world Źymbalist creates is so rich and vast that, for a certain type of reader, 750 pages will not be nearly enough.
A clever and finely wrought steampunk tale about aliens and misfits.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5232-1403-7
Page Count: 764
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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