An imaginative yarn full of sharp twists and engaging psychological depth.
A young woman tasked with assassinating an evil prince finds herself falling for him instead in Leach’s soulful fantasy.
The novel centers on Mira, an orphaned farm girl in the kingdom of Gilan, where tribute collectors strip poverty-stricken families of their possessions and cart off young “maids” to add to the cruel King Derrik’s harem. Mira’s preternatural knife-throwing skills get her recruited by handsome jewelry merchant Roland into the Order of the Dragon, a resistance organization seeking to overthrow Derrik and install its shadowy leader, Domhnall, on the throne. When a bag of explosives Mira is transporting for Roland accidentally detonates, killing one of Mira’s loved ones, among many others, she’s left with a massive burden of guilt. An opportunity for redemption arises when she catches the eye of Derrik’s son, Prince Joren, who’s reputed to be a lothario; he invites her to join him and his guards on a trip to the capital city of Climonta; Roland instructs her to murder Joren and gives her a magic stone knife called Ordalf to do the job in fulfillment of a prophecy. However, Mira’s mission is complicated by the fact that Joren turns out to be kindhearted, brave, gentlemanly, and attractive. Leach’s fictional world has a fairytale feel, with its charms, oaths, folk idioms (“Did Woon himself bite you out there tonight?”), along with its sudden revelations and dizzying reversals of fortune. However, it also has complex, conflicted characters and prose that’s energetic and evocative, whether in piquant romantic interludes—“I took another sip and gazed at the stars with the man I was sent to kill”—or fraught scenes of anguish, as when Mira, in the explosion’s aftermath, scrubs off the blood of other people, including “the boy with the bread, the girl without a leg, of all the people whose remains would be burned in the pyre.” Readers will root for Mira as she struggles to figure out which man to love and which to hurt.
An imaginative yarn full of sharp twists and engaging psychological depth.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1951496234
Page Count: 471
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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