A sprawling fantasy that’s an inventive love letter to the genre.
A diverse group of heroes gathers to battle a witch who can destroy the world in this epic fantasy debut.
It is the Ninth Age of the Fire Horse, and a great evil prepares to consume the world. Tregha is a Forest Ranger hunting for Dagghu warriors in the Arun Delta. The Rangers operate under the leadership of Lord Adfir and hope to meet with the Southern Patrol soon. Tregha is actually half Dagghu, the illegitimate son of Chief Knamu, who used magic to impregnate Lady Lylhanne, an Elf Trueblood hostage. Tregha’s dark stoicism helps keep his monstrous Dagghu heritage in check. When Adfir returns from scouting with a Fennelora priestess named Astoriie, Tregha sees someone who lives in perfect harmony with nature—someone to admire. After learning that the Southern Patrol has been destroyed, the Rangers find themselves battling the animated corpses of their comrades. Astoriie senses an all-consuming evil supporting the Dagghu warriors, who’ve grown bolder. The primary hope standing against this dark force is the wizard Aenrindel of Ellendor. As the wizard travels with a caravan across the Rall’Haku desert to the city of Kabir, he’s accompanied by a young monk called Luo. The 9-year-old child has been instructed by Master Su of the Long Fang Temple to guard Aenrindel but also to eliminate him if he’s seduced by evil. When several cars from the caravan mysteriously vanish into the desert’s red mists, the group steps onto the long road of confrontation with the witch Kakista. Can heroes with both physical and magical might stop her from killing the world?
In this series opener, Kalimeris brings together different types of fantasy storytelling to forge a dense, palate-cleansing adventure. Some readers will respond to motifs similar to those in classics like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, such as races of elves, dwarfs, and the fellowship-style banding together of heroes. Fans of darker fantasy works, including Stephen Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon (1999), will appreciate the parade of fresh concepts that seem almost disposable in their profusion. There are, for example, several elaborately conceived character origins shuffled into the larger story that often enforce an episodic pacing. In a flashback, readers learn of Ryn Kartashee, a “warrior poet” who’s owned by Prince Qelek of Kabir and whose prowess in the fighting pits earns him the love of Harinni, the royal’s betrothed. Ryn and Harinni’s story is grand in its own right, but readers may need patience while the primary narrative rotates slowly back into view. The author’s prose is lean on dialogue, frequently requiring readers to submit to lengthy descriptions of scenes both violent and bucolic. When Navardi, the Chosen of the Sun God Ra, battles an army, “the searing heat soon filled the air with the stench of roasting flesh as ten thousand men cooked at once.” Such violent moments are outnumbered by paeans to nature, as in the passage “Spry flowers in white, gold, and purple pose in the petticoats, millions of tiny dancers suspended mid-lift in the steady hands of their betrothed.” Overall, the imagination on display is remarkable. Yet the equally amazing characters need more space to breathe and potentially carry a less cluttered, more emotionally resonant tale.
A sprawling fantasy that’s an inventive love letter to the genre.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The series’ snarky noir vibe might be dwindling, but there’s something of substance in its place.
This is wizard Harry Dresden’s yearlong mourning period for Karrin Murphy, the woman he loved.
If you keep upping your protagonist’s powers throughout a series, then you must balance the scales by increasing the number and strength of their enemies—as well as seriously messing with their personal life. Over the course of the Dresden Files, Harry Dresden, Chicago PI and now one of the most powerful wizards in the world, thought his first love was dead (she wasn’t), sacrificed his half-vampire girlfriend on an altar to save their child, lost another girlfriend when they learned she’d been mind-controlled into their relationship, bound himself into servitude as the Fae Queen Mab’s Winter Knight, and, for the length of an entire book, thought he himself was dead (he wasn’t). But nothing has hit quite as hard as the death of Karrin Murphy, the former police lieutenant who was his quasi-partner, friend, and, after a slow burn across many books, lover. Chicago is in a terrible state following a battle with Ethniu the Titan and her Fomor army, and Harry is doing his best to confront the monsters, dark magic, and anti-supernatural prejudice running wild amid the slowly rebuilding city. He’s also trying to save his half brother Thomas from two different death sentences, train a new apprentice, and juggle a relationship with Thomas’ half sister Lara, the dangerously seductive vampire Queen Mab is forcing him to marry. But he’s doing all this while nearly crushed by grief that threatens his judgment and disturbs his control over his magical powers. Butcher really makes you feel the dark, depressive state Harry exists in as well as the effect it’s having on his friends. Despite all that happens in it, this book is a pause as well as a setup for the series’ planned conclusion, an epic conflict with the eldritch creatures known as “the Outsiders.” It’s a tough, redemptive pause that could be a real drag, but thankfully, it’s not, because Butcher shows balance, too: Even as the crises pile up, so do the help and goodwill from unexpected sources.
The series’ snarky noir vibe might be dwindling, but there’s something of substance in its place.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593199336
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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