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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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