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
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
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
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