A cozy, witchy hug of a book about the power of acting locally and thinking cosmically.
Page weaves benevolent witchcraft, folksy animism, and environmental activism into a fantasy novel that offers practical optimism in the face of relentless evil.
Iris Barnes, a recently divorced middle-school librarian, moves to the town of Cottonwood, New Mexico, to try to rebuild her life anew. Her house comes with surprises, including a mysterious letter from its former occupant, Joan Flores, and a strangely persistent cat, whom she names Xena the Warrior Princess; as it turns out, the feline is more than she seems—and who narrates part of the tale: “I am here as a helper; well, more than a helper. I just got a promotion. Now, I’m a bodhisattva….Kind of like a warrior princess, but no.” Iris soon finds herself embroiled in the town’s biggest controversy: The mayor and other powerful players want to open their namesake cottonwood forest to development. Iris joins with Joan, Joan’s niece Annabelle, and an adorable, kind locksmith named Ezra to resist the deforestation. They’re not alone in their mission; unbeknownst to them, the Fae and the animals are also marshaling forces to resist encroachment. Page’s approach to all these magical elements allows them to be both fantastical and refreshingly familiar. The history and depth of the powers at play are epic, but the scope of the story is intimate and personal. The stakes feel simultaneously global and local, evincing an understanding that the ley lines channeling the powers of good and evil may crisscross the world, but are always encountered on one’s own corner of the earth. The book is not overtly political beyond its clear environmentalist stance, but there’s something timely and empowering about a novel in which the heroes are a librarian and a young girl armed with the powers of research, kindness, and determination. Page’s care for all of her characters, and her clear optimism for the kinds of change they might effect, will carry the reader to the end of the book—and, maybe, into their own lives and actions.
A cozy, witchy hug of a book about the power of acting locally and thinking cosmically.Pub Date: June 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798286039920
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
