Both heartbreaking and action-packed: an immense achievement.
Two children are scouted as promising prospects for opposing magical syndicates in Lu’s urban fantasy.
Samantha Lang is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant working around the clock to make ends meet in Angel City, California. Her classmate Ari, a boy from Gujarat, India, seems to be the only person who really sees her. They pass each other notes, sharing their feelings but not the specifics of their lives. When Sam’s mother loses her job, Sam is so desperate that she seeks out the fabulously wealthy Diamond Taylor, a local celebrity who has a reputation for making things happen. Sam isn’t sure what to ask for, but it certainly isn’t what she gets: When she’s discovered following Diamond’s entourage out of a fancy theater, she finds herself initiated into the world of alchemy. As it turns out, there’s a secret society of people who are able to tap into the power of their own souls to transmute one substance into another. The popular drug called sand, which is known for making people the best version of themselves, is secretly a product of alchemy. Sand is worth so much money that syndicates—organized groups of alchemists—are in deep competition with each other to produce it. As Sam grows up, so do tensions between Diamond’s syndicate, Grand Central, and its main rival, Lumines. Years after their time passing notes in school, Sam and Ari discover that they have both been trained as alchemists, and they are on opposite sides of the upcoming war between Grand Central and Lumines. Lu’s magical system of alchemy is straightforward and clever—for example, a person can fight by transmuting a piece of a table into a knife, and they can hurt an enemy by transmuting the water in their body into vapor. But even more than the inventive action sequences, Lu beautifully depicts Sam and Ari’s experiences as outsiders in the world of wealth and privilege. Ari as an immigrant, and Sam as the daughter of an immigrant, both have a lot to lose, and their precarity is weaponized against them as they are weaponized against each other.
Both heartbreaking and action-packed: an immense achievement.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250885678
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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