A pulsating blood-booster for raw adolescents—nobody over 20 should buy this.
Blade meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this first of a trilogy about a no-nonsense guerrilla leader of a rock-’n’-roll vampire-killer band. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to make Rolling Stone.
Like, really, does this all spring from Sun-tzu’s The Art of War, as the pseudonymous Banks suggests? Or does Damali Richards’s destiny spring from an event 20 years before, in New Orleans, when her father, Reverend Armand Richards, was turned by master vampire Fallon Nuit and her mother Sarah went to the swamp witch and fatally tried to follow the witch’s steps for exorcising Fallon Nuit, a member of the Vampire High Council and an elder dweller of the dark realm? While all that took place, the Richards’s infant Damali was baby-sat by Marlene Stone—while now, in the present, Marlene is the graying, visionary, real cool seer-guardian of Damali’s Warriors of Light Productions guardian-slayer band of devampers, with Sistah Marlene on electric violin, Mexican Indian Jose, a.k.a. Wizard, on drums and crossbow, Jake Rider on electric guitar, J.L. on crossbow, wooden stake and computer, Big Mike Roberts as audio-sensor, and Shabazz as Aikido-instructor/choreographer/bassist. That’s a bassist who triples in martial arts and dance? Whatever. You know the drill: Rhino bullets fresh-packed with hallowed earth, holy water grenades with the blast of C-4. Just don’t get nicked and turned when vibes sense in the audience multiple cold bodies that need icing. Nobody’s expendable, and four band members have already been nicked or exhumaned. But chill, man, Damali’s kick-ass elements can bring down a small army of vampires. So let’s do this. Except that Damali’s team now finds itself fighting a newer entity that eats out necks, hearts—call it the Amanthra thing from Hell. Later, Fallon Nuit abducts Damali’s sometime lover Carlos Rivera, a Hollywood club owner, and tempts him with the earthly glories earned by Blood Music, Inc. Bad, bad Carlos.
A pulsating blood-booster for raw adolescents—nobody over 20 should buy this.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31680-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and...
The debut novel from Australian actor Arnold is a fusion of paranormal fantasy and mystery set in a world where magic has been effectively destroyed by humans, forcing the supernatural population to live a radically diminished existence.
Fetch Phillips is a “Man for Hire,” which is another way of saying the down-on-his-luck, hard-drinking former Soldier–turned-detective will do just about anything to pay the bills. When a principal from a cross-species school enlists him to find a missing professor—a 300-year-old Vampire named Edmund Rye—Phillips quickly agrees. Without magic, the Vampires—and all other supernatural beings—are slowly dying. So how difficult could it be to find a withered bloodsucker who is so weak he can hardly move around? After visiting Rye’s last residence—a secluded loft space in the local library filled with the Vampire’s research and writings—Phillips discovers that one of Rye’s students is missing as well: a young Siren named January. His investigation becomes complicated when more Vampires turn up dead and he is almost killed himself. While the mystery element of the storyline is a bit thin, the focus on meticulous worldbuilding and highly detailed backstory as well as the cast of fully developed and memorable characters (Simms, the reptilian cop; Peteris, the disfigured half-werewolf; etc.) are unarguable strengths. But the real power here is in Arnold’s use of imagery throughout. His unconventional descriptive style brings a richness and depth to the narrative. Pete’s smile is “like a handbag with a broken zipper,” and the sound of Phillips’ falling from a building is “like someone stepping on an egg full of snails.”
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and Dashiell Hammett.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45582-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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