Come for the early steps in one hero’s journey, stay for the puppylike dragons and princes in exile.
Following a coup, two teenage survivors on the lam join magical forces to fight their way back to their respective kingdoms.
Jai and his brothers have spent the last decade serving the Sabine dynasty faithfully, far from the Great Steppe and cut off from their native culture. Their father, the high khan of the Kidara tribe, lost his head to the former emperor Leonid’s axe. A royal wedding between Leonid’s grandson, Prince Titus, and Princess Erica of the Dansk promises to unite two of the world’s great powers and net the Empire a new weapon in its conquering arsenal. Powerful as the Sabine Empire’s soulbound—warriors granted superhuman abilities and magical powers as the result of their “soulbond” with legendary creatures—are, their Gryphon Guard are hardly a match for the noble Dansk soulbound, who forge psychic connections to dragons. Welcoming the Dansk princess and her father into the capital is just the opening the opportunistic Titus needs to usurp his father’s throne. The prince and his cronies kidnap the princess and massacre all foreign citizens in the Sabine court, including Erica’s father, Jai’s brothers, and the soulbound dragons belonging to the Dansk nobles. Jai escapes with an exceedingly rare, powerful artifact—a dragon egg, cut from its mother’s corpse—and soon finds himself with powers he does not understand as he soulbonds with the beast inside. Thankfully, he has Frida, herself a soulbound, to help guide him—at least until they must part ways at the end of the road, that is. As magical epics go, Matharu isn’t reinventing the wheel here. Still, fantasy fans will find much to love in this series starter. The author describes the interior aspects of Jai’s magic—such as refilling his mana core and grasping hold of the invisible threads binding him to his hatchling—so deftly, readers will forgive him if these sequences run just a little too long at times. Jai is a mixed-race person of color, and Frida’s pale features set her apart in the Sabine Empire.
Come for the early steps in one hero’s journey, stay for the puppylike dragons and princes in exile.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063227576
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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