Vulnerable human moments shine in this preachy sword-and-sorcery saga.
Widseth and his wife, Annel, must prove their mettle as leaders in the second installment of the Brazen Serpent Chronicles fantasy series.
The young Dragon Master Widseth and his partner have stuck to their promise: Rather than sit passively on their thrones, they travel to the lands of Aelandra to rebuild a peaceful Aelfene kingdom. From the beginning, Baird (Talon of Light, 2004) makes clear that they have a tough task. Deorc, the worst of the dark dragons, is back and loyal to his vile mission. He’s found himself a new puppet, a young boy tricked into servitude with promises of revenge, power and freedom. That story may sound familiar, but the themes and conflicts in this novel are more complex than in the first volume. Annel, for example, yearns for maternal responsibility but suffers from infertility, forcing her to spend much of the book on a separate path from her husband’s. Widseth, on the other hand, has become a godlike man who “exudes warmth and kindness.” He can heal the injured and bring people back from the dead—or vice versa—with the touch of a finger. The story is a fantasy through and through, but the characters have refreshingly realistic reactions to otherworldly events. When a dragon of light gets a new responsibility, he pleads, “I am not ready.” After Widseth frees a group of lifelong slaves and tells them to flee from impending danger, the group’s response is understandably dubious, even after the leader’s display of magical prowess. The book has its absurd moments: At one point, Widseth pulls Deorc’s “blackened severed hand” out of his belt pack—he’d been carting it around since the first volume in the series. For the most part, Baird describes even the most abstract concepts in lucid, visual terms: “whirlpools of energy” and “conscious light essences.” If only the blurry guide maps in the front of the book were as high quality.
Vulnerable human moments shine in this preachy sword-and-sorcery saga.Pub Date: June 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1425939892
Page Count: 284
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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