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REFORGED

From the SPARX Luminary series , Vol. 2

While this tale proves complex, once the hero’s mission gets rolling, the intrigue never wavers.

A fantasy sequel focuses on a quest in an unforgiving wilderness.

In Sprague’s follow-up to Out of the Grey (2021), Amot Rixin is a Kith ranger on an important mission. His goal is to retrieve a sword known as a striker that he lost. It may sound like a simple enough assignment, but it will be far from easy. Amot is sent, along with other rangers and queensmen, to an unwelcome place called Whisperwood. Amot and company are transported by fierce women called valkyries. The valkyries command grand flying creatures known as gryphons that have been specially bred. Although the rangers, queensmen, and valkyries are ostensibly all working together, their interactions are not always harmonious. Of course, when the action moves to Whisperwood, there are plenty of other entities to deal with. The place is full of wolflike people known as Wulvers. There are also aggressive ghost pines, which, as one character explains, his grandfather always warned him to steer clear of. From the very beginning, things do not go as planned. One of the valkyries vanishes while flying. Not long after, Amot finds himself in the company of a female Wulver. What else could possibly go wrong? It takes some pages to explain the many players involved. The multifaceted narrative shifts, chapter by chapter, among a number of characters, including Amot, a queensman named Eriff Haulik, and even at one point the hero’s dog, Howler. The details involved can prove tedious. For instance, different aspects of the valkyries are explained, such as why a “wind rider” is not the same as a “knightmaiden” and how a woman named Galewind has been “tied up with liaison duties.” Such information is not particularly key to the major events to come. Yet those events do not disappoint. The dangers of Whisperwood prove peculiar, memorable, and even funny. Human-Wulver relations become prime opportunities for danger as well as comedy. At one point, a Wulver wants a lantern even though he doesn’t actually know what one is. In the end, this wild country is well stocked with enticing developments and not just genre clichés.

While this tale proves complex, once the hero’s mission gets rolling, the intrigue never wavers.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 350

Publisher: GaleWind Books

Review Posted Online: June 5, 2021

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INTERMEZZO

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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