An uneven debut fantasy, but its intriguing setting and well-developed characters show promise.
In Hewitt’s debut YA fantasy novel, a young woman—part human, part elf—joins a group of mages and warriors in the hope of learning how to use her own magic.
The novel gets into the action on its very first page, when a killer swings a sword at protagonist Sylvia, causing her father, the king of Larenta, to sacrifice himself to rescue her. Sometime after her father’s death, she resurfaces at a country inn with a lot of baggage. She encounters a mage named Gavren traveling with his apprentice, Kyra, and Derik, their warrior companion. They ask Sylvia to join them on their journey, hoping they can find someone to heal the traces of “shadow” left behind from the altercation that killed her father. Sylvia’s reluctant to join them, for good reason: She’s half-elf, with a strain of fairy-elf magic in her blood. The magic is powerful and uncontrollable, and she feels she must keep it from any magic users who might seek to manipulate her. The mage’s party manages to convince her to come along, but Gavren soon proves himself untrustworthy when he takes Sylvia’s box, a magical item left to her by her late mother. During their journey, however, Sylvia forms a grudging, mutual understanding with Gavren and Kyra, and quickly falls in love with Derik, who shares her romantic feelings. As a group, they encounter orcs, soldiers and dragons, some helpful and some harmful, and learn more about Sylvia’s importance in a changing world. Much of the book centers on Sylvia’s growing relationship with Derik and her struggles with intimacy; after her father was killed, Sylvia was at the mercy of a group of soldiers, a fact that haunts her throughout the book. The mage Gavren shows the greatest depth; he manages to be a good guy while also resorting to trickery to learn Sylvia’s secrets. The prose is often awkward, however, relying on repetition and declarations of emotion (“[H]e was so taken by the beautiful woman he was made oblivious to what was happening”), and it may sometimes be hard for readers to follow how one event leads to the next. That said, there’s much to be admired in this book; the fantasy setting leaves a lot to be explored in future installments, and Sylvia’s role within it promises great drama.
An uneven debut fantasy, but its intriguing setting and well-developed characters show promise.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475990300
Page Count: 294
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Spanning centuries and continents, this is a darkly romantic and suspenseful tale by a writer at the top of her game.
When you deal with the darkness, everything has a price.
“Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.” Adeline tried to heed this warning, but she was desperate to escape a wedding she didn’t want and a life spent trapped in a small town. So desperate that she didn’t notice the sun going down. And so she made a deal: For freedom, and time, she will surrender her soul when she no longer wants to live. But freedom came at a cost. Adeline didn’t want to belong to anyone; now she is forgotten every time she slips out of sight. She has spent 300 years living like a ghost, unable even to speak her own name. She has affairs with both men and women, but she can never have a comfortable intimacy built over time—only the giddy rush of a first meeting, over and over again. So when she meets a boy who, impossibly, remembers her, she can’t walk away. What Addie doesn’t know is why Henry is the first person in 300 years who can remember her. Or why Henry finds her as compelling as she finds him. And, of course, she doesn’t know how the devil she made a deal with will react if he learns that the rules of their 300-year-long game have changed. This spellbinding story unspools in multiple timelines as Addie moves through history, learning the rules of her curse and the whims of her captor. Meanwhile, both Addie and the reader get to know Henry and understand what sets him apart. This is the kind of book you stay up all night reading—rich and satisfying and strange and impeccably crafted.
Spanning centuries and continents, this is a darkly romantic and suspenseful tale by a writer at the top of her game.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8756-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A quixotic science-fictional universe that plays with memory as much as calamity physics.
A highly secretive intelligence agency fights an underground war against an enemy it can never remember.
Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Nominally, it’s offered here as a series of interconnected short stories, field reports, and other interstitial components of a larger mythology. In these Twilight Zone-quality twists, we learn that our protagonist, Marie Quinn, leads a particular division at the Organization—imagine an international spy agency with G.I. Joe’s budget and The X-Files’ mandate—that locks down “antimemetics,” or ideas that cannot be spread or retained. In other words, how do you fight a war you can never remember exists? “It’s a conceptual ecosystem, of ideas consuming other ideas and…sometimes…segments of reality,” the book explains. “Sometimes, people.” Normally the project’s fragmented, nonlinear nature might work against it, but not here. Though he cleverly stitches everything into a whole after the fact, qntm weaves the novel’s fundamental, world-altering conflict underneath a whole lot of noodle-bending quantum mechanics. There’s even a little romance as we meet Adam Quinn, Marie’s hopelessly normal husband, as he struggles to help his wife remember him, let alone reconnect with her. The disposable nature of most characters doesn’t generate a lot of sympathy, it’s true. But simultaneously solving the linguistic gymnastics around arcane physics and spooking the bejesus out of readers is no mean trick. Much like a first viewing of The Matrix, a clever twist matched with an adversary this unstoppable is both cool and unsettling. The answer? “Ideas can be killed,” says Quinn. “With better ideas.”
A quixotic science-fictional universe that plays with memory as much as calamity physics.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593983751
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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