Intelligent cli-fi fantasy with Fab Four wish-fulfillment tossed into the Magical Mystery Tour.
In this debut novel, three teenagers in the parched, dying world of 2079 use Albert Einstein’s time-travel secrets to go back a century and warn humanity via a surprised music superstar.
Stea’s book joins the field of “cli-fi” climate-change tales, with time travel and real-life eminences involved. A prologue indicates that Einstein discovered time travel and thus beheld the New York World’s Fair in 1964, years after his official death. Now it’s 2079, 40 years after the eco-collapse, mass extinction, and calamitous fires that accompanied global warming. In dusty, mostly deserted New Jersey, adolescent Abbey Lane subsists with her holdout family and friends while most everyone else has migrated to the Great Lakes for scarce fresh water. Exploring the ruins of Princeton University with her friend Max Sutter, Abbey finds Einstein’s secret journal hidden in an antique desk. Her asthmatic, invalid brother, Paul, possesses an awesome intellect, and he deciphers “Uncle Albert’s” time-travel methods from the journal’s pages—how to use naturally occurring, invisible wormholes in time/space to voyage back and forth chronologically. When Paul locates a scheduled wormhole within travel distance, the three kids sneak away from home on a mission to go back in time and warn the world about the future fate that will ensue from industrial emissions and apathy. They do indeed teleport to 1971, and the trio winds up in a New York City filled with hippie idealists and Vietnam War protesters, who sense something special about the three teens who act like they’ve never seen green grass or rain before. Stea somehow avoids a campy tone amid the Greenwich Village and Bleecker Street counterculture (not an easy feat). When the kids enter the orbit of legendary rock musician John Lennon, the handling of Lennon as a fictional character is realistic and persuasive where a more star-struck SF narrative might have gone off the rails. Indeed, readers will suddenly notice Beatles references insinuated throughout. Though modulated for a YA readership, all ages can jam to the leisurely narrative, and older ones who still remember the period may appreciate the what-if treatment that’s brought off well. While the author credits numerous writers, thinkers, and rockers as influences, AWOL is Jack Finney, whose nostalgic time-travel tales echo this one.
Intelligent cli-fi fantasy with Fab Four wish-fulfillment tossed into the Magical Mystery Tour. (acknowledgments, author bio)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73313-591-7
Page Count: 438
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection.
Broken people, complicated families, magic, and Faerie politics: Black’s back.
After the tumultuous ending to the last volume (marriage, exile, and the seeming collapse of all her plots), Jude finds herself in the human world, which lacks appeal despite a childhood spent longing to go back. The price of her upbringing becomes clear: A human raised in the multihued, multiformed, always capricious Faerie High Court by the man who killed her parents, trained for intrigue and combat, recruited to a spy organization, and ultimately the power behind the coup and the latest High King, Jude no longer understands how to exist happily in a world that isn’t full of magic and danger. A plea from her estranged twin sends her secretly back to Faerie, where things immediately come to a boil with Cardan (king, nemesis, love interest) and all the many political strands Jude has tugged on for the past two volumes. New readers will need to go back to The Cruel Prince (2018) to follow the complexities—political and personal side plots abound—but the legions of established fans will love every minute of this lushly described, tightly plotted trilogy closer. Jude might be traumatized and emotionally unhealthy, but she’s an antihero worth cheering on. There are few physical descriptions of humans and some queer representation.
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection. (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31042-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
An ornate and thrilling tale of loyalty and betrayal.
In this work that’s loosely based on Hamlet and the saga of the Boleyn family, a princess becomes entangled in power struggles and travels to a foreign kingdom on a deadly mission.
Princess Madalina Sinet prefers tending to her grave flowers—the magical (and occasionally carnivorous) blossoms that are unique to her kingdom of Radix—over getting drawn into her politically ambitious twin sister Inessa’s plotting and scheming. But after Inessa is sent to Acus, a more powerful neighboring kingdom, as the intended wife of Prince Aeric Capelian, Madalina’s life gets complicated. Inessa’s ghost appears to her, revealing that she’s been poisoned in Acus and asking Madalina to avenge her. Their father, who’s involved in machinations of his own, also has plans for Madalina: He wants her to become Prince Aeric’s replacement bride and then poison him on their wedding night. Madalina has always shied away from the Sinets’ violence and brutality, but she knows she must act in order to save her family and her kingdom—as long as she can avoid falling in love with Aeric. As elaborate and ambitious as the Boleyn family’s own intrigues, this gothic fantasy’s many twists and turns may occasionally leave readers feeling overwhelmed, but the roughly familiar storyline coupled with the fascinating worldbuilding makes this an engrossing read. Madalina and Inessa are cued as being fantasy-world biracial, and the Acusan people have light, sun-bleached hair.
An ornate and thrilling tale of loyalty and betrayal. (author’s note, glossary) (Fantasy. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781682636497
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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