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
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
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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