A pleasant, featherlight woodland fairy tale.
In Black’s novel, a young woman inherits her great-aunt’s wooded estate and responsibility for the magical creatures who live there.
When 103-year-old Melissa Alexander dies peacefully in her bed, her great-niece, Lia Sanders, and Lia’s husband, Eric, drive through the night from Texas to the family property in rural North Carolina. Melissa has bequeathed everything to Lia, including the house, a 400-acre estate that borders the Glistening Rock wilderness area, and a telepathic cat named Athena. She also left a letter explaining that the Alexander family are hereditary guardians of the local “fae,” and that Lia herself has inherited the gift of speaking to them. Soon, Lia is greeted by Hugo and Heidi, seven-inch-tall twin “bropis” (a brownie-pixie hybrid) who shape-shift into birds and live in the herb garden. Lia and Eric decide to relocate permanently to the alcove. They’re joined by Lia’s young nephew, Michael, who’s just lost his parents in a sailing accident and shows signs of inheriting the family magic. Trouble arrives in the form of a corrupt governor named Gregory Lassiter, who tries to use eminent domain to seize part of the property so his brother can build a visitors’ center and road through the forest. Minor conflicts ensue over the fate of endangered wolves on the estate. The tale is threaded through with themes of environmental stewardship, inheritance, grief, and the magic of the natural world, along with a gentle celebration of marriage and chosen family. Black writes warm, basic, readable prose. Twee domestic sequences abound involving tea on the porch, herbs in the garden, and Athena purring on the bed while telepathically projecting her thoughts (“Clear your thoughts and listen”). But the fantasy elements never quite dig in—the lore of the bropis is delivered in tidy expository chunks rather than through discovery or demonstration. What little conflict arises is resolved without major tension, and the villainous governor feels lifted from a different book. Readers craving more intense enchantments may consider this tame, but cozy-fantasy fans will find it just the right temperature.
A pleasant, featherlight woodland fairy tale.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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