An intriguing story that questions what makes for a successful life.
A compassionate man doggedly follows his strange destiny despite frequent uncertainty in Smith’s novel.
Duncan Graham tries to avoid living an extraordinary life. His mother, McKenna, and his absentee father, Ethan, were star-crossed lovers from feuding Scottish clans. The unwed couple separated, with Ethan sending McKenna and Duncan to America to avoid scandal. Duncan enjoys a normal life growing up with a single mother until he is 11 years old—that’s when he magically cures his best friend Timmy’s polio (“The room filled with light”) and discovers that he is a healer. Duncan does his best to keep his gift a secret, using it sparingly as he grows into adulthood, but he’s thrust into the public eye when he’s forced to save a young woman struck by a car. Duncan is uncomfortable in the spotlight, but he holds meetings at a former church to heal people, eventually moving to a bigger facility. Thanks to negative publicity generated by those he couldn’t cure, Duncan’s “ministry” flounders, and he also suffers serious personal reversals. It isn’t until Duncan accompanies McKenna’s body home to Scotland that he truly begins to understand his power. He begins roaming the world and helping others, leading to a fateful reunion. In Duncan, Stone has created a totally believable character; he reacts as anyone would if they received a life-saving power with no owner’s manual. (Actually, he likely does better than most, as Duncan leads with his heart and uses his gift to benefit others.) The narrative is affecting as friends slip in and out of his life, and even his mother, who knows more than she lets on, frustratingly leaves him alone to navigate his own path. The author makes it annoyingly difficult to keep track of time—while it is clear that the novel covers Duncan’s life, it’s less evident how many decades this entails. Still, Stone triumphs in building an admirable character who succeeds despite his gift.
An intriguing story that questions what makes for a successful life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 522
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
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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