Will appeal to readers who crave its melding of fantasy and dark academia, but its spell could use a bit more seasoning.
A child of Mandeville, Jamaica, and Astoria, Queens, Ellory Morgan is determined to get the credentials she needs from America’s youngest and strangest Ivy League college, even if she’ll never belong and danger lurks at every turn.
A 21-year-old freshman, Ellory is significantly older than her classmates. Between her age, lower-middle-class poverty (she’s on scholarship), and race, she keenly feels her distance from her peers, many of whom seem to have always known each other. Tangling with the insufferably handsome and entitled Hudson Graves, who “loomed over the freshmen like an angry god” at the library that bears his family name, only worsens her misgivings. But what really cinches Ellory’s unease at Warren is the magic. Buildings, even neighborhoods, seem to shift around; a soccer ball hurtling toward her stops just before impact, and a tattoo appears on her shoulder and disappears just as easily. Ellory had experienced strange occurrences in childhood, but on campus, the magic is inescapable—and so is the danger. To graduate, Ellory will have to watch her back as closely as her books and maybe even make peace with her most inscrutable rival. Connoisseurs of rivals-to-lovers stories will appreciate the palpable tension between Ellory and Hudson. Their chemistry is equally palpable. Cole’s writing is vivid and creative, sometimes even poetic. She excels at conjuring Warren’s special cocktail of sinister spookiness and academic intensity. The campus is deliciously dark and believably shrouded in lore and rumors of missing undergraduates. But Ellory’s relentless insecurity in the face of her ongoing success grows repetitive, as do the book's frequent social critiques, which often lack nuance. For example, since students from underrepresented groups are routinely challenged for not having earned their places in elite colleges, an observation regarding privilege in these spaces seems awkward: “The wealthy bought their way in. The poor begged their way in. Both groups were praised for their admission as if their journeys had been equal.”
Will appeal to readers who crave its melding of fantasy and dark academia, but its spell could use a bit more seasoning.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781464216909
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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