Great fun, with nonstop action and with an escape hatch that would allow—dare we hope?—a sequel.
A thrills-and-spills conclusion to the adventures of Sancia Grado.
Bennett concludes his Founders trilogy, preceded by Foundryside (2018) and Shorefall (2020), with characteristically high-spirited mayhem. The magic of scriving, which is to say, melding two objects together to form weapons, tools, and the like, has been extended to humans and even whole cities, so that the medieval-tinged metropolis of Tevanne now roams the land, searching for transubstantiation: “Tevanne did not wish to have a body anymore. It had calculated many times that, should it shed this corporeal form, its intelligence should still persist in all the various lexicons and rigs throughout its empire.” Against the bad-tempered and ill-intentioned Tevanne stand characters we’ve met in Bennett’s previous volumes, but with considerable attention given here to their backstories: We learn, for example, that the keylike creature called Clef (naturally) once took quite different form, that Berenice and Sancia are more than comrades in battle, and that Gregor Dandolo has more resources than hitherto hinted at. And then there’s Crasedes Magnus, who has strong skills as a shape-shifter and, mercurially, is good one minute and bad the next; it’s for good reason that Clef in particular harbors deep hatred for him. Some of Bennett’s yarn concerns the origins of scriving, a bit of technological sorcery that, often put to bad uses itself, reveals some good sides as well and produces a happy ending—at least for the survivors. Bennett’s language sometimes runs blue, sometimes knotty (“The Keyship’s espringal batteries wheeled about and sprayed the night skies as the shrieker bolts descended”), and readers will be lost in its idiosyncrasies and the story’s plot turns if they haven’t read the first two books. The effort to do so is well worth it, though, for Bennett is a master of worldbuilding, and for all the novel’s far-fetched moments, everything seems perfectly logical on its own terms.
Great fun, with nonstop action and with an escape hatch that would allow—dare we hope?—a sequel.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2067-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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