This engrossing fantasy kicks off what’s sure to be an epic journey.
An outsider must abandon his home and survive alone on a savage planet in this debut novel.
Darmon is born on peaceful Sindor, a technologically and psychically advanced planet. Machines handle everything, from sustenance to the birth process. This allows telepathic Sindorians to focus on their own development—individual Visions, followed by shared evolutionary Perfection. But Darmon is different in many ways; he’s bigger and more defined than soft-bodied Sindorians. His “uncontrolled feelings” also make him a potential danger and unsuited for joining the Collective Mind. Between the choices of dealing with isolation and leaving, Darmon opts for the latter. The planet where he ends up is rife with jungles, a drastic change from Sindor’s desert landscape. Darmon must scour for food, tend to his own injuries, and fight menacing “creatures that lived by devouring the weak,” all with skills he picks up as he goes along. But he vows to realize his personal Vision, in which he, like the “long-dead father” he never met, builds a civilization on a primitive world. Baker’s pithy writing will ease readers into this fantasy series opener. Clear-cut details on Sindor’s unusual customs, for example, roll in almost immediately. This drops the hero into unavoidable circumstances, as he becomes a pariah simply for being different from everyone else. But once he lands on the unnamed planet, the story is all about survival. This somewhat mutes Darmon’s (and the novel’s) emotional resonance, despite his volatile feelings being the reason he exits Sindor. Still, the interplanetary, multispecies cast shines. Kylin, for one, is the closest Sindorian to Darmon, who sees her as a mother (her egg was used in the “Conception Room” for his birth). Even the jungle animals make an impression; while they’re familiar creatures, they are often introduced with an air of mystery, and Darmon makes a few friends. The ending perfectly sets the stage for the sequel.
This engrossing fantasy kicks off what’s sure to be an epic journey.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9798857610015
Page Count: 325
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
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 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
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