A brilliantly executed installment in a series about vengeance and self-determination.
In Brower’s second fantasy-series entry,a demigod learns how to wield her powers, but her teacher has ulterior motives.
Following an attack on the safe-haven dimension of Taria, the dark magic that demigod half-siren Renna Strongborn has suppressed for years awakens within her. In her agony, she accidentally opens a portal leading to Sethos, a fae with whom she had been close during her first lifetime and who’d declared himself her “soul guardian” seven years ago. Renna trusts Sethos, so she enters the portal and joins him in his fortress in Daya. She learns that she and Sethos were both abused by Renna’s father, Am-Re, the god of darkness, chaos, and ruin, and despotic ruler of the Vasarys dimension. Eight years ago, Sethos overthrew and killed Am-Re, who’d adopted him, and not only gained his throne, but also some of his powers, which flow through Renna’s veins, as well. When Sethos tells Renna that he intends to avenge his mother and homeland, Renna promises to help. He helps her learn how to wield her powers to their full, lethal potential. Their relationship becomes more intimate, but when he tells Renna about the destruction of Isyos, where Am-Re once ruled, he leaves out a vital detail: The attackers, whom he aims to kill, were the Celestial Gods who had sheltered Renna in Taria—including Khellios, her past-life love interest. While Sethos manipulates Renna, Khellios leaves Taria and goes on a quest to find her. Brower’s sequel is a captivating tale of betrayal, vengeance, and love, primarily told through the perspectives of Renna, Sethos, and Khellios; this gives readers a keen and sometimes-devastating understanding of each character’s motivations, which they sometimes hide from others. The masterful worldbuilding features well-developed systems of both magic and governance. Readers may be mildly disappointed that Renna doesn’t have any meaningful interactions with other women, but her journey—during which she learns to accept and control her powers while maintaining a sense of right and wrong—is truly compelling, as is Sethos’ relentless desire for revenge.
A brilliantly executed installment in a series about vengeance and self-determination.Pub Date: July 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798991248204
Page Count: 440
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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