Characters wreak havoc and homicide on an epic scale in this breathlessly paced action-fantasy.
In Black’s SF debut novel, a ruthlessly efficient assassin must deliver a powerful relic to the next in the line of succession following an empress’s murder.
A coup by a treacherous Chancellor and his hordes results in the death of the formidable Empress. Now, the Imperial Orb, an artifact of immense potency, must pass to her royal heir. The rightful successor is 17-year-old princess Jenanine Blackwater, who’s uninvolved in her kingdom’s conflicts and, aside from healing skills, painfully lacking in magisterial magical arts. Kora, known as the Silver Slayer, is the Imperial factotum tasked with delivering the Orb to Jenanine. She’s the most fearsome of a caste of solder-assassins—many of whom, it seems, are on the bad guys’ side. Depending on their home worlds, Slayers wield weapons based on water, ice, wind, rock, or other natural elements. Hailing from the harshest planet—one that’s “barren and brutal just like its people”—Kora has a host of deadly talents. After crash-landing on Jenanine’s world, Kora and the Orb become targets in a skirmish between dragon-rider Witches and the Muri, whose youthful Prince Cameron makes impulsive choices that place his life in peril. Then again, just about everyone in this novel is in danger thanks to the Chancellor, the Shara-La dragons, and the vampirelike aliens who’ve insinuated themselves into the clergy. Black’s high fantasy novel offers virtually nonstop combat in a realm where interplanetary travel and aliens mix with magic-wielding beings, royalty, and brutish warriors. Various players alternate first-person narration, with the notable exception of lethal, enigmatic Kora; intriguingly, most can’t see past their petty provincial-nationalist feuds, which are often laced with racial overtones, to see the crisis’s bigger picture. The violence is unsparing and often head-spinning: “Twisting my body, I bump her off and swipe at her leg with my blade. She hisses in pain as metal cuts the skin on her thigh, but before she can get back to her feet, two arrows lodge themselves into her sternum.” An open ending leaves many bloody plot points unresolved.
Characters wreak havoc and homicide on an epic scale in this breathlessly paced action-fantasy.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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