A strong debut with soft SF elements offering major crossover appeal for fantasy aficionados.
A polyglot from a colonized moon nation stumbles into a web of interplanetary intrigue when her erstwhile lover is murdered.
Language scholar Enitan Ijebu's appointment as a scribe sent shock waves through the Holy Vaalbaran Empire's religious community. As a native from Koriko, a Vaalbara-colonized moon, Enitan has no legal right to citizenship within the Empire; her homeland has not yet assimilated into Vaalbaran culture at large, which makes her people no more than "savages" in their oppressors' minds. After her older sibling, Xiang, disappears, Enitan suspects foul play, leaving her with no choice but to turn to the one person whose help she doesn't want: Koriko's half-Vaalbaran governor, Ajana Nebaat—her ex-girlfriend. Enitan barely has time to make amends with her ex before the governor is murdered, however. Imperial forces quickly sweep her off to the Vaalbaran capital—a massive, floating structure known as the Splinter—as a scapegoat for the assassination. There, she'll join the recently coronated God-Emperor's court as a political prisoner. Unfortunately for Enitan, the court intrigue begins long before she reaches the Splinter. Emissaries from Vaalbara's biggest enemy, the Ominirish Republic, recruit her as a spy en route to the capital, and the God-Emperor herself, Imperator Menkhet, keeps her close as an "informal advisor" practically from the moment she arrives. Here, Ashing-Giwa constructs a sweeping backdrop for her characters' plights to play out against. The Vaalbarans' personal and political oppression of the Korikese calls to mind European conquests across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Readers will recognize conversations regarding cultural appropriation, the looting of sacred artifacts, slavery, and sexual stereotypes, among other things. Notably, the characters' racial traits cannot be used to distinguish their nation of origin. Enitan is coded as Black, both Xiang and Menkhet have "golden" skin, and many tertiary characters are White. Members of a nonhuman race—the synths, whose existence is outlawed in the Empire—emerge as secondary players in the novel's second half.
A strong debut with soft SF elements offering major crossover appeal for fantasy aficionados.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781668008478
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A character-driven fantasy story that doesn’t waste readers’ time.
Dymitr, a monster hunter turned monster, must return to face his family when he’s called home for a funeral in the second of Roth’s Curse Bearer series.
Baba Jaga, the great sorceress of Slavic folklore, has something that belongs to Dymitr: his bone sword, a magical weapon that comes from his own spine. As a Knight of the Holy Order, Dymitr was meant to use it to kill magical creatures, whom he was taught to regard as inhuman. After learning that everything he was taught about monsters was a lie, that they are in fact just as human as he is, and after Baba Jaga turned him into a magical monster himself, Dymitr has no interest in hunting them anymore. Baba Jaga made Dymitr a zmora, a magical being that feeds on human fear, and he’s only interested in figuring out what to do with his new life. But his bone sword is also made of a piece of his soul, and being separated from it will cause him to go mad. Luckily, Baba Jaga is happy to give Dymitr his sword back—so long as he kills 33 fellow Knights, starting with his own grandmother. Horrified at the thought of killing the woman who raised him, Dymitr hears more awful news from his sister. His uncle has died, and the family is gathering to perform the Knights’ burial rituals. Dymitr hopes that he can use the trip home to steal his family’s book of Knight curses and offer it to Baba Jaga as a bargaining chip for his sword. As in the first installment in the Curse Bearer series, Roth’s fantasy worldbuilding is efficient and effective. Most of the short—for fantasy, anyway—novel is dedicated to tense action sequences, expanding the fantasy world in ways that directly impact the plot, and to compelling character development as Dymitr faces his violent family.
A character-driven fantasy story that doesn’t waste readers’ time.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781250855503
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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