A fantasy series opener that unfolds with increasingly delightful surprises.
This fantasy finds a sorcerer’s daughter attempting to escape his influence while learning the true nature of her own powers.
The sorcerer Sidonius rules the Black Keep, aided by a young, white-haired woman he calls Daughter. Though she longs to see the vibrant life outside the Keep, her spirit is too weak to dare leave. She’s also key, along with a magic scroll, to the ritual that maintains Sidonius’ health by funneling her inner being “into Father’s unseen wound.” To escape the pain, she imagines being in a “lush woodland” that she somehow knows intimately. When Sidonius acquires some mercenaries to magically drain their life force, she notices a striking pair of men. They are Capt. Mason Khoury and Reid “Archer” Tarhill. While she believes that people are “all slaves to circumstance,” Archer disagrees. She helps the charismatic soldiers escape, and the three head west to the comforts of the Bear Clan. There, she awakens to her ability to read minds while touching a person (or animal) with her bare hands. Chieftain Bradan, who speaks with the dead, believes that “something is missing” from the woman whom Archer has named Cara (meaning friend). She also grows closer to Khoury, which becomes difficult when she learns that Nalia, another woman, seemingly dominates his heart. In this series opener, Bennett deftly illustrates village life through characters like Ingrid, an older medicine woman. Polar bears, especially Cara’s beloved Gar, play an important role, though it’s bittersweet to see a vulnerable species alongside fantasy beasts like dragons. The author’s pacing is excellent, balancing copious travel among locations like the city of Iolair with plot-jolting revelations. The cleverest narrative gambit uses the character Falin, an outcast member of the matriarchal warriors of Foresthaven. Falin’s presence threatens to upstage Cara and further complicate her romance with Khoury. Bennett’s fabulous eleventh-hour twist prevents these tropes from playing out. The finale nearly hits a dour note but instead chimes with a glorious cliffhanger.
A fantasy series opener that unfolds with increasingly delightful surprises.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9988086-0-4
Page Count: 449
Publisher: Miramae Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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