A gripping if sometimes-formulaic fantasy about a thief and a warlock navigating a tense relationship.
Linde presents the second installment in her ongoing urban fantasy series starring a daring young thief.
Following her 2024 book The Wren in the Holly Library, the author continues the adventures of her main character Kierse, a young woman whose New York City stomping grounds are suffused with supernatural beings and maintains a tense peace thanks to the Monster Treaty (the book’s standard fantasy-novel map depicts a mystically transformed Manhattan). In the previous book, Kierse met a charismatic but forbidding warlock named Graves under perilous circumstances; readers wanting more of their tense, combustible relationship will be happy to see Graves return in this sequel. Again, Kierse must undertake a daring theft; again, things go wrong, and when Graves saves her, she’s obliged to undertake a mission for him, despite her bitter feelings (“For a time, she’d even thought she could read him when no one else could,” readers are told. “How wrong she had been”). Graves is a powerful figure, but Kierse has magic of her own: To a point, she can absorb and simply ignore magic spells and potions. This a great advantage for a thief, but will it be enough for the epic adventure Graves assigns her, particularly when some of her enemies are dead set on destroying the Monster Treaty once and for all? Thanks to Linde’s tremendous narrative energy, readers will certainly want to learn the answer to that question—like its predecessor, this is a very readable, page-turning adventure story. There is a fair amount of lazy, slangy, or cliched language to contend with (like a mention of “dark bedroom eyes,” or characters saying “showtime” before they go into action), and it seems like every fourth word in the text is an f-bomb. Despite these flaws, the electricity between Kierse and Graves is captivating throughout.
A gripping if sometimes-formulaic fantasy about a thief and a warlock navigating a tense relationship.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781649378521
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled: Red Tower Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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