This story is brimming with potential, but the various plot threads fail to coalesce.
A student at a magical school discovers a new form of magic as the institution is threatened by outside forces in Oey’s fantasy novel.
Lina Arnoult, who hails from a prominent magical family, is excited to begin studying at the elite Taliesin Academy—but she is humiliated when the entry assessment of her magic rates her a 29 while the other students score in the 70s and 80s. She is stripped of her noble status, shunned by her teachers and other students, and her parents refuse to speak to her. While struggling to improve, Lina discovers alternative ways of performing magic that challenge the way the subject is usually taught. In her second year, she is determined to prove the school and her detractors wrong. Meanwhile, a group of non-magical commoners called Novus Vetus is attacking magical schools to challenge the superiority of magicians; Lina’s newfound skills may be more important than she realizes. Pacing issues bedevil this novel, mostly because it is trying to do too many things at once. Lina’s first difficult year at Taliesin is skipped over, thought it forms the basis for her motivations. The second half of the story focuses on the attacks by Novus Vetus and their political implications, despite the fact that the author has not developed the fictional world of the narrative much beyond Lina’s school. The magical system is an inventive one, but its role in the story is bogged down with overly wordy descriptions and exposition-heavy scenes discussing magical theory. (“Wordless magic is called ‘wordless’ because it isn’t spoken, but that is a misnomer. Words are technically used if only in thought to cast a spell internally.”) Lina discovers a new avenue of magic, but the conventional approach to the art isn’t sufficiently described to illustrate how her method is different, or why she is the only one who’s discovered it. (The magical action scenes work better than those describing its practice in dry, textbook language.) Still, Lina is a stubborn, strong-willed, and occasionally ruthless character who is nevertheless likable and fun to read about.
This story is brimming with potential, but the various plot threads fail to coalesce.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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