An underwhelming conclusion to a dragon romantasy series.
After a young woman discovers she's a dragon, she has to learn how to act like one.
It’s been a year since Tamsyn's life crumbled in an instant. After years of being a royal whipping girl, she was married off to Fell, Lord of the Borderlands, and discovered that both of them were dragons in human form. Then he died. Tamsyn was accepted into the pride led by Vetr, Fell’s brother, but after a lifetime with humans, she struggles to learn the ways of dragons and still yearns for Fell. Though everyone tells her she should move on, she has a physical brand that bonds them, and it seems to be telling her he’s still alive. Her confusion grows when Vetr tries to convince her to bond with him and forget Fell. When she learns that Fell isn’t actually dead, but buried so deep in a mountain that he can’t escape, she leaves the pride to try to save him—but so much has changed in the past year that it’s not clear she’ll be happy even if she can. This sequel to A Fire in the Sky (2024) doesn't live up to that book's promise. The decision to resume Tamsyn’s story a year after the cliffhanger ending is jarring, and even fans will need several chapters to figure out what’s going on and settle into this story. Tamsyn’s growth is compelling, but it feels one-note because of Fell’s absence from most of it except as an object of longing; though the book is a romantasy, there isn’t much romance to be found. Much of the emotional heft of the first volume came from the conflict and chemistry between Tamsyn and Fell, and though Jordan attempts to add complexity through a potential connection between Tamsyn and Vetr, it feels out of place in the context of the world she’s built, and is barely explored before Tamsyn abandons the pride. Though Tamsyn remains a compelling character, the book never rises to the expectations set by the first volume, and the ending is strangely underdeveloped for an apparent duology.
An underwhelming conclusion to a dragon romantasy series.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9780063414341
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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