An entertaining yarn with imaginative make-believe and vigorous prose.
An African boy deploys incredible fighting prowess and a bag of tricks to recover a magic stone belonging to his subterranean tribe in this rousing fantasy.
Jones’ novel imagines a lost tribe called the Ankh Adar that has been living in a Namibian cavern for 200 years after escaping slave traders. Life underground has given the members eerie blue-gray eyes, a heightened sense of smell, and four times the strength and speed of other humans, in part due to their diet of glowing blue grubs that feed on the dung of the giant, man-eating bats that constitute the cave’s main downside. Also sustaining the tribe is the Bensaya stone known as “The Glimmer of Life,” a football-sized diamond whose yellow glow lets them grow produce and has healing properties. Anchoring the narrative is Oye, a put-upon 12-year-old whom the tribe considers a coward because he froze in fright while his father was killed by the bat-king Sidiki. When “palefaces” led by a mercenary named Bellevue steal the Bensaya diamond, superlative lady warrior Mahua sets out to retrieve it, taking Oye and his older brother Uchee along. The trio fight off hyenas as they track Bellevue and his posse, largely by their smell. Oye is separated from Uchee and Mahua, but he trails the stone to a freighter sailing off across the Atlantic. Oye boards ship the ship with the help of dolphins and is befriended by shambolic Cajun sailor Lafayette Boudreaux. Debarking in New Orleans, Oye revels in wonders unknown in the cave, like chewing gum, indoor showers, and nightlife in the French Quarter. Oye intermittently continues the search for the Bensaya, which embroils him in brawls with cops and Bellevue’s henchmen along the way to locating the mastermind Ether, a supermarket tycoon whose ancestors enslaved the Ankh Adar’s legendary hero Dobro.
Jones’ story has a Raiders of the Lost Ark feel, featuring exotic locales and a quest for an ancient Mcguffin. The narrative is powered by pint-sized superhero Oye, an endlessly plucky and resourceful kid who is forever twirling, somersaulting, pole-vaulting, and bashing bad guys with his Jak stick, or resorting to more arcane devices from his leather pouch, which has everything from a blow-gun loaded with tranquilizer darts to “forgetting powder” that wipes opponents’ memories when puffed in their faces. The action scenes are rollicking and inventive, boasting a panoply of unlikely weapons. (“Then like a king cobra snake, the boy leap forward and spit a combination of soap and water into the big man’s eyes. Waters turned and screamed rubbing his burning eyes with both hands.”) Jones’ writing is vivid and evocative, whether describing the sound of hungry glow-bugs (“like bacon frying in a pan full of hot grease”), the unsavoriness of villains (“Ether had the look of an expensive mortician, searching for a cheap corpse”), or the spell of a blues guitarist, whose songs “seemed full of hurt, despair, and problems, but also full of hope and life.” Readers will root for Oye as he treks resolutely through his oddball odyssey.
An entertaining yarn with imaginative make-believe and vigorous prose.Pub Date: April 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798389910607
Page Count: 289
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 23, 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
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
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