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 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
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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