A rich, dreamy tale that’s infused with spirituality.
In Huddles’ fantasy novel inspired by South Asian culture, an abused princess finds love in the arms of a traveling musician and later undertakes a quest to achieve inner peace.
Twenty-one-year-old Asha is the last Raajakumaaree born to Palace Isha, a house that, by the decree of the royal Shaasak, sits in the subpolar forest 800 miles north of the Shaasak’s seat of government. However, she’s ceded her hereditary title to her abusive husband, Cabaan, whose only love is money. As Cabaan uproots the forest for profit, clearing it to plant the grotesque and deadly kuroop trees that feed on mineral deposits and harden into priceless wolfram-wood, Asha takes a substance known as dava to endure his marital attentions. When Asha isn’t numb, she’s miserable; it was she who instigated the marriage, and now she blames herself for the forest’s destruction. Then, on the eve of her 22nd birthday, she meets and falls in love with Ilarô, the royal geetakaar, or poetry singer. Their time together is soon cut short, but Ilarô’s influence on Asha is lasting. She sets out to petition the Shaasak to get a divorce, but will she survive the 800-mile journey and find the closure that she so desperately seeks? Huddles’ omniscient narrative frames Asha’s life as a fable told in the far future. This conceit effectively allows for a fairy tale–like melding of the real and the unreal as well as occasional breaking of the fourth wall. As a result, events feel heightened throughout; the characters—with the exception of Asha’s inventor cousin, Omala—tend toward familiar archetypes, and the second half of the book takes on a mystic bent that adds gravitas and slows the pace. The prose style is accomplished and often unrestrained, with simple dialogue but descriptive flourishes and lengthy musings on meanings and motivations: “the forces of impossibility and inevitability were working evenly on her, leaving no remainder.” The result is immersive and beautiful—a tragic romance that will appeal to lovers of diverse, original storytelling.
A rich, dreamy tale that’s infused with spirituality.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73585-352-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Notable Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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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