Echoes of real world events bring deeper darkness, and brighter light, to Barlow’s finale.
Barlow concludes her trilogy with a battle between a killer who can resurrect the dead and the ultimate evil.
Jack Harper grew up in a cult that trained her to kill. Her adoptive father, Cyrus, built a network of evil to do the bidding of the Builder, a manipulative creature that feeds off the world’s ills. Now free of Cyrus, Jack plans to take on the Builder, pitting her ability to control those she kills against its own formidable powers. Joining her is a group of “ferrics,” the Builder’s ancestral enemies, and among them is Lutin, who gave Jack her resurrection talent. While Jack and Lutin are “two halves of the same heart,” not all of the ferrics trust her. As the group travels to the Builder’s otherworldly domain, betrayal is in the offing. Strange events ensue, including translocation and a plan that involves “godsoul,” a healing miracle substance doled out by the Guardian. In a last-ditch effort to eliminate innocence from the world, the Builder uses Jack’s brother to unleash a pandemic. With humanity at stake, will Jack run out of maneuvers to halt the Builder’s hunger? Barlow ends the Jack Harper trilogy with more of what hooked fans from the start—inventive plotting, consistently high stakes, and emotional realism. Jack still shoots her way out of most situations without blinking, but Patrick also kills this time, and he feels that his “heart had been disfigured.” In several surreal moments, readers get closer than ever to the Builder, whose “blank face changes. A mouth forms. Lips. Teeth. It smiles.” The author acknowledges the difficulties wrought by Covid-19 in lines like “the virus...eats the tiniest bit of godsoul from each person.” The winning theme that runs through the series, emphasized in the final volume, is that positive change is possible.
Echoes of real world events bring deeper darkness, and brighter light, to Barlow’s finale.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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