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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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