This exceptional tale drops readers into an immersive world with unforgettable characters.
People unite to stop a powerful, evil being from destroying their world in Cox’s fantasy novel, the first in a series.
Seventeen-year-old Selaina lives in isolation; her mother warns her never to wander past a particular stream in the forest. Beyond it, apparently, lies the “wicked world” of Galanor. That doesn’t stop Selaina from jumping the stream, but one day, she returns from a forest walk to discover her mother missing. She sets out to find her without much of an idea of where to search and luckily runs into an obliging ally along the way. Elsewhere, Rykan, a relatively inexperienced soldier in the kingdom of Elenior, looks for help. Merciless Vatreus has led his Iron Flood army to devastate the capital city that Rykan and fellow soldiers vowed to protect. Help may come from the Wishing Stone, which some claim can undo things that have already happened. Rykan ultimately crosses paths with Selaina as they and several others brave savage creatures and a dark, ancient building to get that stone. Cox masterfully builds an expansive world within a taut narrative—characters pass through a ruined city and enter an enchanted forest “from which no one ever returns” while name-dropping locations in Galanor that readers don’t see in this first installment. Genuinely terrifying villains keep tension high, from Vatreus (who wields a blue-flamed, oversized sword) to a variety of creatures covered in flames or “black fur bristling like jagged spikes” that the cast must defend themselves against. Interactions among Rykan, Selaina, and their comrades are highlights; they prove to be either fiercely loyal or deceptive, and while some share romance, others don’t make it to the end. Nonhuman races add further texture, with Selaina enduring rancor and epithets for being a pointy-eared “Lith” just like the much-despised Vatreus.
This exceptional tale drops readers into an immersive world with unforgettable characters.Pub Date: March 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798990954830
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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