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
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
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
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