An imaginative collection that puts a modern spin on beloved fairy tales and myths.
This eclectic volume of short stories explores familiar and futuristic landscapes through characters that love, yearn, ache, and make sacrifices.
In “Book of Shadows,” a young woman casts a spell to bring her father back from the dead, promising years of her life in exchange. Although her wish is granted, she immediately realizes she’s made a fatal mistake. “I’d known the price was part of my life,” Sandy remarks after her final conversation with her father. “I’d just thought I had more life to trade.” Ariane, an insectlike priestess in “Minotaur,” must set aside her religious beliefs and the interests of her race, the fictional Mirosians, when she falls in love with a human prisoner destined to be fed to the Goddess. True to speculative fiction, the tales explore time travel, government conspiracies, and the inner lives of androids, but the characters always feel relatable because of the dangers they face. Mythical monsters appear in these pages along with the real—and therefore even more horrific—terrors of everyday life: unemployment, rent bills, fear of abandonment, and loneliness. While Dallas is ravaged by a hurricane and the subsequent power outages in “Saving Alan Idle,” a disabled programmer named Eileen Yu struggles to rescue her laptop, which contains her greatest creation, an artificial intelligence named Alan. Alan in turn looks back at Eileen’s life, wondering how using a wheelchair has deprived her of intimacy and friendship. “In Sickness and in Health,” one of the best stories in Villyard’s collection, follows an android named Robbie who goes to extreme lengths pretending to be human to provide for his dying owner, Lydia Anderson. Love appears as little moments of empathy and connection across species, as when Robbie asks Lydia what it was like to be a child and she responds: “Days were longer then….There was joy in play that lasted for hours and hours. And it was safe.” The less successful tales in this volume rush through the events without concern for character development or, like “Toads and Roses,” appear to be simple retellings of familiar plots from children’s books.
An imaginative collection that puts a modern spin on beloved fairy tales and myths.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2022
ISBN: 9798986833019
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A unique concept that promises readers will find at least one, if not three, entwined but different narratives to enjoy.
When Vis is copied into two other realities, he must stop a god from repeatedly culling almost everyone back home.
Thousands of years ago, to prevent the Concurrence from enslaving everyone, the world was split into three near-identical copies: Res, Obiteum, and Luceum. To exist in all three worlds, to wield Will there, is to achieve synchronism. After the events in The Will of the Many (2023), which cost Vis his arm and the life of his friend, Vis achieves Synchronism. While Res-Vis must continue to play Hierarchy politics to find his friend’s killer, Obiteum-Vis finds a ruined world, where the dead are reanimated and used by Ka, the Concurrence, and the only other person to exist in synchronism. Meanwhile, Luceum-Vis is forced into a dispute between druids, their High Council, and their kings—with one king intent on killing him—and Vis has no idea why. On all worlds, Vis is as shrewd as ever, weighing his options, planning ahead, and doing what he must to survive. However, he, too, slowly diverges, doing things he swore he never would: cede his Will, use Will to control someone else, and reveal his true name. If at least one Vis cannot use his synchronism and power of Will to kill the Concurrence, no Vis will be safe, and another Cataclysm will cull those he loves on Res. Book Two of the Hierarchy series is a speculative fantasy that is at once Egyptian post-apocalyptic, Celtic medieval, and Roman dystopian, thanks to the multidimensional setting. Although the sprawling narrative at times overextends itself, Islington rewards patient readers with a compelling story, a cast of complex and diverse characters, and a glimpse into how far a good man can go before he’s lost. A symbol at the start of each chapter delineates which world and Vis it’s about. Readers should read The Will of the Many before attempting this volume, or they may be confused for the first several chapters and beyond.
A unique concept that promises readers will find at least one, if not three, entwined but different narratives to enjoy.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781982141233
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
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