The promise of more clashing action will have readers clamoring for the next book.
Altruistic orphan Lann is destined to be paired with the Dreadblade, a magical, deadly sword that demands fidelity of its bearer as it eliminates evil.
After his mother dies in childbirth and his father is fatally attacked by a wolfish creature, humble Lann takes refuge with the witch Fleya. While there, Lann learns that her sister was his birth mother and receives a visit from Rakur, a trickster god who gives him the Dreadblade. Now Fleya and Lann, plus Dreadblade, are driven to save Stromgard from a conspiracy as well as from the monsters from the Void. All of this is orchestrated by the vengeful prince Kelewulf and the villainous sorcerer Yirgan. Kelewulf is determined to ruin the Rivengeld royals with dark Art and gain power. The tropes are familiar but don’t feel formulaic thanks to a cast of characters with well-developed backstories. Even Kelewulf is viewed with sympathy by his cousin, King Erik. Historical events are seamlessly interspersed with present-day action, contests fought at close range, and a hint of romance, leaving readers cheering for the hero. Lann maintains his appealing humanity because it is the Dreadblade who identifies the evil, allowing Lann to make peace with delivering justice. Kelewulf’s comeuppance will have to wait since the book ends with a cliffhanger. In this Scandivanian-inspired setting, characters default to white.
The promise of more clashing action will have readers clamoring for the next book. (map) (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7339-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Not much forward momentum but a tasty array of chills, thrills, and chortles.
The victory of Jacob and his fellow peculiars over the previous episode’s wights and hollowgasts turns out to be only one move in a larger game as Riggs (Tales of the Peculiar, 2016, etc.) shifts the scene to America.
Reading largely as a setup for a new (if not exactly original) story arc, the tale commences just after Jacob’s timely rescue from his decidedly hostile parents. Following aimless visits back to newly liberated Devil’s Acre and perfunctory normalling lessons for his magically talented friends, Jacob eventually sets out on a road trip to find and recruit Noor, a powerful but imperiled young peculiar of Asian Indian ancestry. Along the way he encounters a semilawless patchwork of peculiar gangs, syndicates, and isolated small communities—many at loggerheads, some in the midst of negotiating a tentative alliance with the Ymbryne Council, but all threatened by the shadowy Organization. The by-now-tangled skein of rivalries, romantic troubles, and family issues continues to ravel amid bursts of savage violence and low comedy (“I had never seen an invisible person throw up before,” Jacob writes, “and it was something I won’t soon forget”). A fresh set of found snapshots serves, as before, to add an eldritch atmosphere to each set of incidents. The cast defaults to white but includes several people of color with active roles.
Not much forward momentum but a tasty array of chills, thrills, and chortles. (Horror/Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-3214-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed.
The third episode in the Skyward series sees red-hot space pilot Spensa Nightshade coming into her full powers as she battles both pirates and space monsters in a strange interdimensional nowhere.
Leaving her ongoing feud with evil galactic overlords on temporary hold back in the somewhere, Spensa passes through a portal to a realm where time and memories tend to slip away, bits of landscape randomly snipped from reality float like islands around a distant sunburst—and teeming hordes of disembodied, malevolent entities called delvers are relentlessly hunting her down. Fun as all the space-opera elements are, though, they continue a trend from the preceding volume in deadening the efforts of Spensa and sidekicks old and new to establish personal identities or backstories, wrestle with inner demons, or, in the case of the AI M-Bot, practice insults and deal with newly discovered emotions. A few wild aerial dogfights and larger battles later, however, Spensa has come into her cytonic superpowers, found out some crucial things about the delvers, and made her way back to the somewhere. Now for those overlords….McSweeney contributes a map, lovingly detailed sets of spaceship plans, and galleries of the multispecies cast members. Wild diversity of intergalactic body types notwithstanding, human members seem uniformly White.
More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed. (Science fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-399-55585-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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