An occasionally slow-moving but overall promising start to a fantasy series featuring a hero with magical powers.
young wizard searches for his place in the world in this debut novel.
Dogalas of Kharathad is the adopted son of a farmer, a smart and solid lad who is destined for something more than small-town life. He travels to the Wizard Tower, where he is accepted as an apprentice under the tutelage of a wizard, Master Găbriel. Upon graduation, Dogalas takes to the road, embarking on a journey to gain experience and assist others as a newly minted semizard. His faithful (and mystical) steed, Sandstorm, accompanies him, and they encounter kingdoms inhabited by nonhumans, including elves and gnomes. Dogalas slowly begins to hone his craft, using magic to locate water for a well or battle devilish pixies. His heroic actions to help save the kingdom of Harfang bring Dogalas face to face with the warlocks, creatures of insurmountable evil (“Reptilian humanoids with skin blacker than night, sporting spaded tails and wicked wings”). Following an epic battle, the young wizard undertakes a quest to learn more about the sinister warlocks—“demons without souls, or pity, that used dark magic to steal the souls of others”—and their history. All the while, Dogalas searches for clues about his biological parents, gathering tidbits of information that imply his family connections might explain his extraordinary skills. Weighing in at a little over 750 pages, this book delivers an encompassing fantasy world that follows in the footsteps of J.R.R.Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. Ben Ephraim’s kingdoms are full of magic and mystery, and she does an admirable job of constructing multiple cultures with different languages, foods, belief systems, and traditions. The author is at her best during her first contact stories, such as when Dogalas encounters the gyontar and must survive an unusual feast. Dogalas is a likable protagonist, and his unknown (though surely promising) parentage and background present a tantalizing enigma. Unfortunately, Dogalas’ time on the road bogs down the narrative considerably. Ben Ephraim devotes hundreds of pages to the semizard’s wanderings from place to place. Though these scenes physically move Dogalas along, they do little to further the plot. A few thousand less steps in a long trek would be not be missed.
An occasionally slow-moving but overall promising start to a fantasy series featuring a hero with magical powers.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5076-7218-1
Page Count: 774
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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