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
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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