A layered and emotional epic fantasy opener.
Ellis offers a debut fantasy novel set in a violent city that’s secretly controlled by magical forces.
In the city of Yddinas, Cael Brenion is a longtime champion arena combatant. One night, the bloodthirsty audience demands that he not only kill his current opponent, but soak his hands in the man’s gore. In his last moment with the enemy, the honorable Cael promises to provide for his opponent’s son; he also dedicates the match to his own younger brother, 12-year-old Breilyn, who lives with a foster family. At the local temple, high priest Agenayus prepares Cael and the other arena victors to place their hands in a holy fire to absolve their sins. However, Chancellor Rovert Orik intercedes and promotes Cael to Champion, an exalted status that only two other men in Yddinas enjoy, including Cael’s mentor, Braddw. Rovert is an insecure ruler who’s obsessed with having an heir despite his own failures in the bedroom. He encourages chancelloress Valeina to bed the man of her choice in order to become pregnant. Valeina, however, loathes Rovert and is determined to solve the riddle of Yddinas’ isolation from the northern realms, in part due to a mysterious, mirrorlike barrier. Only Agenayus, a powerful mage of the Suuroc race, knows the truth about mystical beings who live separately from humanity. For this series opener, Ellis marries the characters’ personal dramas to the fate of the city that they inhabit while also developing a grandly magical plot, which simmers in the background. Game of Thrones fans will savor the tightly controlled cascade of deceptions among the cast. The prose effectively reflects the hardscrabble existences of most of the people in Yddinas, as in the line, “A glare lingered between Cael and Breilyn, like two angry dogs fighting for the same tree to piss on.” When characters aren’t actually dueling, they cut each other with words, as when Rovert tells his wife, “You were a peasant, doomed to marry off into a middle-class family...and become another useless, spoiled hag.” The players’ bighearted gestures and delicious acts of evil are consistently riveting, and an intriguing, world-expanding finale makes the sequel unmissable.
A layered and emotional epic fantasy opener.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Mage Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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