A sumptuous bonus meal for fans who devoured the author’s Dynamicisttrilogy.
Science-based wizardry battles a demonic horde in Hunt’s latest fantasy epic.
The Methueyn War is well underway. The mad wizard Nehring Ardgour has invaded northern Engevelen using an army of skolves, or humanoid wolves, and the might of demons Skoll and Heti. The heavenly force of Methueyn Knights is dwindling, and the key to victory now lies with minor players who must rise toward greater destinies. Lt. Davignon “Dav” Delatam has seen a demon in action and has been summoned to aid Farrah Harbinger, Engevelen’s premier wizard. At Harbinger Hall, Farrah needs to find out which future path leads to Nehring’s defeat, and in order to do that, she needs Dav to interpret her visions. In the end, Farrah sees their city, Courant, destroyed and the One True Devil revealed. Meanwhile, near the city of Aurillon, Aveline “Ave” Vanier and Byron “Bro” Breaux are Deladieyr Knights, juniors to the Methueyn Knights. They carry the Methueyn Treaty, a massive 12-foot sword used in the ceremony that elevates a Knight, bonding them with a Methueyn angel. As the pool of candidate Knights shrinks, the pair prepare to send the newly risen Sir Revenberge into battle. And in Villiers, an older man known as Mick, who lives in a rest home, wants weaponry for himself and other residents, so they can defend against skolves. His sense of personal renewal begins when he saves a puppy, whom he names Fenris, from a damaged building. Greatness also calls for the wizard Halwyn Glace to push his skills further than ever alongside his fellow wizard and unrequited love, Lady Katherine Valcourt.
The events in Hunt’s latest epic occur 250 years before those in his Dynamicisttrilogy. In the prologue, Lady Koria Valcourt, Katherine’s ancestor, says, “The Methueyn Knights are an uninteresting subject, for they lacked the ability to change or grow.” This comment likens them to iconic heroes of myth, such as the Norse Thor (the bridge connecting to the Methueyn heavens is even called Bifrost, the name of a rainbow bridge in Norse myth). It also frames the narrative's main theme: that ordinary individuals can make decisions that shape history. Numerous motifs carry over from Hunt’s previous work, including a frustration with politics. Marias Garragorah, Nehring’s ambassador to Engevelen, reveals that “the best deals I have seen done, the real win-lose moments of history, have all been attended by an absence of empathy, remorse, or reciprocity.” The detailed magic system is visible in the actions of Grace, who physically incurs the thermodynamic cost of teleporting soldiers from danger (he gets colder). The demons in this book are impressively portrayed as forces of nature; we learn that, “As they drew closer to Skoll's passage, the smell of offal and rot increased....Logs, branches, produce, and shit were splashed everywhere.” The broadest human aspect is exemplified in the character arc of the elderly Mick. He’s done things he isn't proud of, but he now struggles to remember his life from moment to moment. As Fenris’ presence assures him, “He was alive, but he could see that it was all downhill...he felt sure somehow that it had all been to a purpose, to an idea that was still part of him.” Hunt exemplifies how to make heroes shine within the large cast of a sprawling saga.
A sumptuous bonus meal for fans who devoured the author’s Dynamicisttrilogy.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77797-340-7
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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