All too brief, alas, but a must-read for all fans of this outstanding series.
Novik crowned her nine-book Temeraire sequence, an alternate-world Napoleonic Wars featuring intelligent dragons, with League of Dragons (2016) and now weighs in with an associated all-original story collection, each entry occasioned by an accompanying fan illustration.
The entries comprise six stories plus 26 “drabbles”—a term, invented in Monty Python’s Big Red Book (1971) and possibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to novelist Margaret Drabble, indicating vignettes of 100 words or less. So accomplished, absorbing, and wide-ranging is Novik’s creation that the stories elicit enormous pleasure even when the contents are slight. Intriguingly, some don’t fit into the canon at all even when the world they evoke is perfectly familiar. In the splendid “Golden Age,” for example, we meet a Capt. Laurence who never encountered the Chinese imperial dragon Temeraire and is still a sea captain; here, he comes upon a similarly huge black dragon who calls himself Céleste and has taken up piracy as a career. “Planting Season” offers a glimpse of independent American dragon John Wampanoag making a living conveying cargo. “Dawn of Battle” features Capt. Jane Roland (later admiral and Laurence’s lover) taking charge of her dragon and crew as her mother never dared to do. A literary what-if, “Dragons and Decorum,” presents dragon-captain (!) Elizabeth Bennet, her dragon, Wollstonecraft, and her suitor, a certain Mr. Darcy, in action during the French invasion of England detailed in Victory of Eagles (2008). And the drabbles form an intriguing bunch: readers will have enormous fun working out where, or even if, they fit into the series, with outtakes from various times, locales, and events, whimsical sketches (Temeraire reads Beowulf, much to his confusion), and still others that hint at alternate worlds within alternate worlds (a dragon egg attended by robot servants hatches on an alien planet).
All too brief, alas, but a must-read for all fans of this outstanding series.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59606-829-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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