Love letter to Blood Curse fans, but new readers are invited, too.
In the sixth volume of Dawn’s Blood Curse series, the Silivasi brothers learn the whereabouts of their father.
The Silivasi brothers—Kagen, Nathaniel, Marquis, and Nachari—are vampires from the house of Jadon. Their lineage is the result of a curse struck against the Romanian Prince Jadon (and his more evil brother, Prince Jaegar) in 800 B.C.E. Today, the Silivasis live in Dark Moon Vale with the women who are their “destinies” (human mates chosen by the gods) while they battle lycans and members of the rival house of Jaegar. When Saber Alexiares—“no longer a Dark One, at least, not technically. In truth, he never really had been”—visits Nathaniel’s brownstone with claims that the Silivasis’ father, Keitaro, is alive and enslaved in Mhier, the home dimension of the werewolves, the brothers are hard-pressed to believe him. But what choice do the Silivasis have? Meanwhile, in Mhier, the tragedy-hardened Arielle Nightsong has been secretly aiding Keitaro, mending the physical and mental anguish inflicted by King Tyrus Thane and his lycan minions. But now, to punish his top general, Cain, for sleeping with Queen Cassandra, Thane will stage an arena battle between Cain and the legendarily brutal Keitaro. Even if Keitaro survives, however, Thane’s sadism is limitless. Will the Silivasis breach this parallel world in time to save the father who’s been presumed dead for centuries? Fans of Dawn’s steamy paranormal series will feel like she’s delivered the main course in this latest installment. Nimble prose and pacing also help new readers learn her detailed world. Once inside, they can enjoy the focus placed on Kagen, the only brother not yet paired with his “destiny”; there’s an irresistible erotic pulse in his scenes with Arielle: “He ran his hand upward along the small of her back...and buried his fingers in her silky, wild hair.” Thane’s monstrous desire for Arielle is a satisfying wrinkle in a plot that sometimes doesn’t challenge the protagonists enough (for instance, they learn how to travel across dimensions too easily). Tantalizing mentions of prior events deepen the series’ narrative and show that Dawn intends for her cast to continuously evolve.
Love letter to Blood Curse fans, but new readers are invited, too.Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1937223120
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ghost Pines Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.
Short-story virtuoso Saunders' (Tenth of December, 2013, etc.) first novel is an exhilarating change of pace.
The bardo is a key concept of Tibetan Buddhism: a middle, or liminal, spiritual landscape where we are sent between physical lives. It's also a fitting master metaphor for Saunders’ first novel, which is about suspension: historical, personal, familial, and otherwise. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president, sort of, although he is not yet dead. Rather, he is in a despair so deep it cannot be called mere mourning over his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862. Saunders deftly interweaves historical accounts with his own fragmentary, multivoiced narration as young Willie is visited in the netherworld by his father, who somehow manages to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, at least temporarily. But the sneaky brilliance of the book is in the way Saunders uses these encounters—not so much to excavate an individual’s sense of loss as to connect it to a more national state of disarray. 1862, after all, was the height of the Civil War, when the outcome was far from assured. Lincoln was widely seen as being out of his depth, “a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Among Saunders’ most essential insights is that, in his grief over Willie, Lincoln began to develop a hard-edged empathy, out of which he decided that “the swiftest halt to the [war] (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest.” This is a hard truth, insisting that brutality now might save lives later, and it gives this novel a bitter moral edge. For those familiar with Saunders’ astonishing short fiction, such complexity is hardly unexpected, although this book is a departure for him stylistically and formally; longer, yes, but also more of a collage, a convocation of voices that overlap and argue, enlarging the scope of the narrative. It is also ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us. Lincoln, after all, has become a shade now, like all the ghosts who populate this book. “Strange, isn’t it?” one character reflects. “To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors utterly forgotten?”
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9534-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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