An uneven collection whose longer stories shine.
Magic, nature, and violence abound in Lovelace’s debut short story anthology set in Indiana, Tennessee, and Louisiana.
These seven stories, which take place in various eras from 1946 to 2044, address issues such as poverty and addiction, sometimes in a fantasy context. In “Virgie’s Headless Chicken,” a bullied high-school girl severs the heads of 23 chickens, hoping to find one that can stay alive without it. In “Savonne, Not Vonny,” one of a few tales with supernatural elements, the young title character learns to wield magic (“make minnows jump into a coffee can, make butterflies light on her shoulder, make grass grow into flowers”) and must keep a conjuring book out of the hands of Diamond John, an almost 7-foot-tall man who can “turn an Ace into a Jack, cause a man to trip over a leaf and break his leg, make a woman start bleeding even though it weren’t her time of the month.” Throughout the collection, Lovelace’s short, declarative sentences make fantastical concepts seem part of daily life; the prose is most successful when evoking a sense of place through rich description: “Savonne would lay awake at night, in her bed, her wild hair haloed around her face, listening to the sounds of Motown music as it mixed with the laughter of the greasy-legged girls.” Three stories are fewer than 10 pages long and would have benefited from the inclusion of less exposition and more scenes in which something specific is at stake. Also, Lovelace struggles to evoke specific time periods; there’s little to tie “Virgie’s Headless Chicken” to its 1946 setting aside from the lack of cell phones, for instance, and few specific details point to 2044 in “Sauce,” the collection’s final story. Still, Lovelace succeeds in her longer works, in which she crafts complex characters struggling with affecting and timely issues that touch on wider themes. In “Sauce,” for example, a young woman struggles with opioid addiction in the near future amid a devastating viral pandemic.
An uneven collection whose longer stories shine.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781958901250
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Liminal Books
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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