Characters and humor make this magic-meets-steampunk novel worth checking out despite its shortcomings.
Married couple Isolde and Warren Wilby, Hexologists and private investigators, must solve a royal mystery before the kingdom collapses into chaos in the first book in a new series.
When the royal secretary interrupts the Wilbies’ teatime because the king is asking to be baked alive into a cake, it’s just a normal day for the magical investigators. It seems a blackmailer’s claim of an illegitimate heir is driving the king mad. Iz wants nothing to do with royalty, but Warren reminds her that an unrecognized heir creates a power vacuum, which means Luthland's vulnerable will suffer all the more. When a forest golem breaks down the cellar door and heads straight for the royal secretary, that seals the deal: The Wilbies take the case. Magic exists in the Wilbies’ world, one strikingly similar to London during the Industrial Revolution, and Iz is a student of hexegy—the casting of hexes. With Iz’s powers and Warren’s social skills, as well as a large cast of side characters that includes a librarian, a foodie dragon who lives inside a magic carpetbag full of relics, and an alcoholic imp, the mystery unravels into stranger and stranger revelations. If the Hexologists can’t solve the case quickly, it could tear the kingdom apart—literally and figuratively. While the book gets off to a promising start, with action and intrigue bathed in delightfully wry humor, the language soon begins to feel like it's had a wrestling match with a thesaurus. The pacing and clarity sometimes suffer from this cleverness, though the main characters are likable and what you’d expect from a quick-quipping husband-and-wife investigative team. They aren’t unique, but they are fun. If Bancroft had spent more time developing them instead of jumping from one side character to another and given them real obstacles instead of a too-convenient history/tool/hex to solve every problem that arises, this book could have been top-notch. As it stands, this magical tale—ultimately about classism and justice—should still find an audience in need of a chuckle and a mystery to solve.
Characters and humor make this magic-meets-steampunk novel worth checking out despite its shortcomings.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780316443302
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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