A concentrated burst of monster-loving, enemies-to-lovers fun.
Hijinks abound when a prickly dragon-shifter accidentally claims his fated mate without wooing her first.
Fiery and a little reckless, Cherry Hotpepper has spent the last five years cooped up in an aging dragon-shifter’s island tower. Her captor has never said a word to her, and she isn’t entirely sure why he hasn’t eaten her. Yet every escape attempt ends the same way: with someone forcefully returning her to the dragon’s keep. So when another dragon-shifter shows up and offers to help her get home, Cherry leaps at the chance, but she’s already drugged the newcomer with a powerful hallucinogen. Little does she know that Dante Remnac can barely keep his hands off her—and that was even before he was doped up. In the aftermath of a monumental war, Dante’s few remaining friends have all found human women to love. Even so, he hasn’t been actively looking for a bride; stumbling upon his fated mate while visiting his father’s old friend Gideon was merely a happy accident. Still riding high on an ayahuasca trip that sees him chastised by a talking banana after his arms crawl away from him, Dante bites Cherry’s neck, sharing his magic with her and jump-starting their honeymoon...before he’s even learned her last name. Readers in search of character-driven stories will find much to love here, as Cherry, Dante, and a wide cast of secondary characters are all fully realized people. Unwilling to put her family in danger by telling her new husband where they live, Cherry waffles between wanting to escape and yearning for more of Dante’s—literally—electrifying touch. Neither of them realizes her sister is married to his friend, leading to an abundance of miscommunication that never betrays the novel’s overall coziness. Lemming’s latest is a gleefully flirty romp through a fantasyland tinged with shades of Diana Wynne Jones and Heather Fawcett.
A concentrated burst of monster-loving, enemies-to-lovers fun.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780316570350
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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