This intriguing fantasy creates a memorable, if dense, twist on a society in trouble.
A debut fantasy focuses on a defenseless city that faces a dire threat.
Welcome to the City of the Magicians. It is a place where pilgrims travel to the Sacred Temple of Life in order to partake in the Holy Spring That Never Fails. The Holy Spring has water with supposed healing properties that have attracted many outsiders. The city is careful to cater to these visitors, or, put more cynically, there is a “priority of siphoning off as much currency as possible from pilgrims while presenting an aura of sanctity and superiority.” It is also a place with a detailed bureaucracy. Sas of Elisa House is a member of the Council of Deliberators. In the opening pages, he is tasked with an incredible assignment: He must communicate remotely (utilizing a technique called “sendings”) with a barbarian horde that plans to invade in the spring. The city has no standing army or weaponry. Sas may be its only hope. He must convince the barbarians that the City of the Magicians is not worth destroying. Meanwhile, a young librarian named Lalya becomes involved in a secret, oversexed organization. The group loves nothing more than a smoke-filled orgy, but its power runs much deeper than carnal pleasures. In Gribble’s series opener, a lot of information is thrown at readers quite quickly. An appearance of a mysterious “trail of 5’s” on buildings; various council members to keep track of; and the importance of the “book-and-paper market” introduce a great deal of complexity early in the story. Still, the narrative takes a novel approach to the excitement of a city targeted for invasion. Not only is this assault some time away, the plan to thwart it is unconventional to say the least. Certain diversions and explanations do mitigate some of the tension. For instance, readers have much to unpack about this magical city’s history and schools of thought. Passages include wordy, perplexing information, such as “The Shapers charged the Pushers with not being assiduous in using Augury before practice.” But things do pick up in later chapters. A hapless emissary named Maxon is sent to talk to the barbarians. His journey makes for a meticulously curious (and dangerous) adventure tucked neatly into the grander tale.
This intriguing fantasy creates a memorable, if dense, twist on a society in trouble.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-2288-1220-3
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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