A powerful journey through space, time, light, and enduring love.
Two great cosmic beings traveling the cosmos are drawn into a struggle for a world’s existence in Lefebvre’s novella.
Our Mother and Her Love enjoy exploring the universe, wandering wherever their whims may take them. It is while traversing an abandoned star system that Our Mother gets sucked into a void, with Her Love following behind her. Upon waking, they feel compressed, small, stuck—and cannot remember their true natures. Our Mother and Her Love feel listless, like they know something is wrong; something is missing. They take a boat to a distant shore and start to create a new home for themselves. In a cave, Her Love finds a crystal that responds to the light within them. As their family and their community grow, so does the crystal, shining its light and hope across the land. Even after Our Mother and Her Love die, the crystal’s light and knowledge continue on in the world and down through the generations. Our Mother and Her Love are born again from time to time, and they always find each other to further spread the light and hope. But the void and its evil presence will not be denied, and so darkness also comes to their lands, and for countless generations, the people of Our Mother are subjugated and exploited. It is only with the continued rebirths of Our Mother and Her Love, and the aid of the crystal shard, that the darkness can be pushed back. With the author’s beautiful black-and-white illustrations included throughout the text, this fantasy novella tells a story of hope, endurance, and the ultimate triumph of light over dark, no matter how bad things get. Told in the manner of a folktale passed down to keep the story alive, the narrative can be seen as an allegory for much of human history. The engrossing, eons-spanning story, evocative illustrations, and Lefebvre’s poetic prose (“Life is beautiful, but attach not your heart to appearances that bloom and wither like summer flowers”) make for an enjoyable one-sitting read.
A powerful journey through space, time, light, and enduring love.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9789090402222
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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