Vibrant characters, both human and monstrous, enliven an enjoyable series opener.
In this debut fantasy and trilogy launch, a young woman with supernatural abilities tries to protect her new friends from otherworldly creatures.
When Xlina Dar’Karrow isn’t studying at the University of Maine, she’s hunting all sorts of creatures from the monster-laden Otherworld. She’s a baku, who can feed on her own nightmares and use that energy for fighting, including by boosting her powerful punch. Xlina has grown accustomed to a solitary life of hunting alone. Then a succubus social worker, Valeria Furtul DeSuflete, throws everything into a tailspin by tricking Xlina into a binding pact, and she now claims the 20-something’s body and soul. Xlina thankfully bumps into a few new allies at this vulnerable point in her life, including her neighbor and fellow student Amber Sedgewick and necromancer Oxivius Soulforge. Caring about other people, however, has its drawbacks—especially when sinister Otherworlders targeting Xlina—including a witch coven and a despicable warlock—also go after her friends. Meanwhile, Valeria, as a voice in Xlina’s head and as a presence in her dreams, offers advice on whom the baku should hunt, although Xlina wonders how far she can trust her. Westgate loads up this series starter with action, black magic, and colorful creatures derived from real-life and fictional folklore and mythology. Powerful, capable Xlina, for example, battles Cu Sith (soul-collecting hounds from Scottish lore) and a stranger who transforms into a Lovecraftian, brain-eating cephalopod. Despite these gleeful fantasy elements, the story proves just as strong in portraying the real world. Xlina is a pragmatic monster hunter (who wears yoga pants for maximum comfort), but Oxivius and Amber offer her fine friendships (with one blossoming into a potential romance). Taut action scenes propel readers through a string of skirmishes and rescues, while the uncertainty surrounding Valeria keeps tension high. Westgate leaves plenty of plot threads dangling for sequels to pick up.
Vibrant characters, both human and monstrous, enliven an enjoyable series opener.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2021
ISBN: 979-8477227730
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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