Though the tale is dense with dialogue, the unique protagonist makes for an engaging companion on the journey.
Trzebunia’s coming-of-age fantasy novel follows a gifted young woman as a prophecy sets political machinations in motion.
Peregrine is 12 winters old. Her father, Sir Walter, is one of the King’s Knights in the realm of Moran. It may not be a typical routine for a young lady, but Peregrine spends her mornings training with a weapons master named Roth. She is also skilled in the use of healing herbs, and she can tell when someone is lying. Perhaps most impressive of all, though, is her ability to communicate with animals. Despite such talents, Peregrine doesn’t get along with her disapproving stepmother. Not that Peregrine goes around advertising her abilities—she mostly talks to her father about such things. It is he who points out that, while she is indeed a rare person, “It is the rarest gem that carries the most value.” When Peregrine’s father vanishes, she is, of course, concerned; to complicate matters, after he disappears, a girl from the neighboring kingdom of Din Sul shows up in the Moran woods. The girl, Tianan, is confused about how she wound up in this location—particularly since Moran’s relations with Din Sul have been strained for years. Meanwhile, in Din Sul, the emperor is told of a prophecy that indicates the emergence of two important powers. While one of these powers would appear to be someone like a king, the other is more mysterious: the Gatherer of Creation. Regardless of who this Gatherer turns out to be, the emperor has plans to harness both powers so that he can one day take over the land of Moran.
The novel doles out quite a bit of information early in the text: Readers learn of Peregrine’s routines, her abilities with various animals, the difficulties with her stepmother, and the fun she has with her sister. As pleasant a character as Peregrine is, there’s not a whole lot of action to compel readers’ attention until her father disappears, nearly 100 pages into the story. Much of the heavy page count is given over to dialogue; when the characters talk, they tend to talk a lot (a typically verbose passage reads, “I am not ashamed to tell you that I am a nobody, from nowhere, hidden my whole life in the middle of a forest down at the tip of the kingdom”). Peregrine is, nevertheless, an endearing protagonist, and not necessarily a character whom readers might expect to lead a fantasy novel. Sure, she’s trained in combat, but healing and communicating are more her bailiwick; after all, she can help a tree’s health by touching it. As she gets older and her abilities increase, she’s able to lead readers further into the unknown. And the book has a great deal of the unknown, beyond Moran and even Din Sul. Later on, Peregrine laments, “Had I had even one day of inner peace since my father had disappeared all those years ago?” This lack of peace helps the story maintain continuous forward motion.
Though the tale is dense with dialogue, the unique protagonist makes for an engaging companion on the journey.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Jack Frost Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
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
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