An entertaining dark fantasy set in a city’s demonic underworld.
A demon agent goes undercover to infiltrate a rival gang in Fey’s urban fantasy novel, the first in a series.
Enzo is a Fel: a fallen angel, a demon locked in perpetual warfare with the servants of God. In practice, he spends his nights riding his BMX bike around Atro City as a food deliveryman, partying with witches and trolls, and using his magic to find pleasure wherever he can with little regard for who gets hurt along the way. Enzo can’t kill humans directly—to do so would be to risk his own immortality—but he’s not above bringing about their deaths through other means. Generally, he and the other demons try to keep low profiles: “While exposure couldn’t be prevented in all cases, it was better if credible rumors about paranormal encounters never got started to begin with. Ignorance kept the humans docile and compliant.” One night, after unintentionally rescuing (and then intentionally bedding) Nadine, the queen of the local werewolf pack, Enzo is summoned to the offices of his boss, Dreadlord Mulct, and given a special mission: Nadine’s partner, the pack alpha Lorcan, has gone missing. Presumably, he’s either dead or being held hostage by the Unfallen, a rival (and allegedly “good”) sect of demons. On the orders of Lucifer himself, Enzo must infiltrate the Unfallen and free the captured werewolf. As Enzo goes about convincing the Unfallen that he’s one of them, he makes progress with a delivery customer, one that he’s been slowly seducing for the past year—a vegan enchilada-lover named Hailey. The deeper Enzo gets into his mission, the more he starts to understand the reputation the Fel have among their enemies. For the first time in his life, Enzo is forced to question his own allegiances.
Enzo’s world is full of all manner of ghouls and monsters, which the author humorously renders in her sharply observed prose. Enzo returns to his apartment to find that the wyrm he’s keeping there hasn’t eaten the food he left out for it: “Humphrey was tucked around a chair leg, quivering with guilt, but then it shamelessly proceeded to swallow the remains of a plastic bottle it had been chewing on during Enzo’s absence….The cold cuts he had left were still on the paper plate and hadn’t been touched. ‘You’ll eat plastic, but not meat?’ ” The world is richly drawn, and the narrative doesn’t take itself as seriously as many other novels in the angels-and-demons fantasy space do. The romance content is tamer than the cover suggests, though the profanity is abundant and the story can get quite violent at times. The characters are fairly stock, and Enzo’s cool-guy schtick is a bit humdrum in a city populated by so many varieties of night children. Even so, fans of the Halloween aesthetic will enjoy this tale enough to come back for future volumes.
An entertaining dark fantasy set in a city’s demonic underworld.Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 979-8731739580
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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