An offbeat and engaging story of a mythical creature.
Modern New Englanders go up against an ancient, fire-breathing dragon in Baird’s debut fantasy series starter.
Tryggvi Brynjarson is a young Viking who loves to explore. While on the island of Vestmannaeyjar with his father and others, he goes off on his own and discovers a unique stone. He keeps the rock with him throughout his life, including during a grueling journey in search of new land; he eventually marries, and his wife has a child. Centuries later, Tryggvi is reborn as a dragon, which emerges from the stone that he’d discovered. The dragon is perfectly content to live alone in caves, but the humans that it periodically encounters are frightened of it and attack it with weapons. About 1,000 years later, in the modern day, 17-year-old New Hampshire native Liam Tryggvison visits his grandfather in Maine. While hiking in the forest, he’s excited to find a cave full of gold coins. But Liam also awakens the aforementioned dragon, from which he narrowly escapes. Once the dragon is outside and takes flight, it confronts aircraft and gunfire. Surprisingly, the winged creature then vanishes almost as quickly as it appeared. Liam, feeling guilt over how the dragon endangered people’s lives, is determined to track it down—although the beast may be ready to hunt. Much of Baird’s tale doesn’t feature the titular creature. The lengthy initial section, however, is utterly engrossing, as Tryggvi faces harsh cold at sea as well as land-based perils such as bears and wolves. The early part of the book also offers the perspective of the sympathetic dragon, who has hazy memories of its previous life and wants humans to leave it alone. The author’s straightforward prose clearly establishes the regularly changing settings and delineates the passage of time. Baird also delivers brisk action scenes, as when the dragon battles the aforementioned “metal birds” that are capable of hurting it. The ending offers resolution but also incentive for readers to check out the next published installment.
An offbeat and engaging story of a mythical creature.Pub Date: April 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5204-1250-4
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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
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
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