An ambitiously realized world dampened by an unfocused plot.
A collection offers Hahn’s (The Ring and the Flag, 2015) four novellas set in his Lands of Hope fantasy realm.
In the month of Hawk, in the year 1995, ADR, a 15-year-old boy who is completely gray, drifts ashore in the Lands of Hope. Gypsy people called the Rom watch him bury his father, who didn’t survive their ocean crossing in a skiff, then adopt him as one of their own. Taking the name Solemn Judgement, the boy heads for Conar, the City of Wonders, named after the heroic Hopelord who conquered the Men of Despair centuries ago. In Conar, the magical Law has never been broken—yet Judgement unwittingly does so when he runs through a city square intended only for walking. An elf from the Sages Guild named Cedrith comes to his aid, later bringing him to the guild to learn to read and write. Elsewhere in the Lands of Hope, Trainertown waits for any adventurers sturdy enough to come back from the monstrous wilds of the Percentalion. When a band led by the warrior Haltar returns, needing food and rest, the preacher Alaetar immediately recruits them for another dangerous mission. Meanwhile, the evil Wolga Vrule lurks in an extradimensional prison, plotting with the demon Kog to shatter the peace created by the Hopelords. Hahn presents an immensely detailed world bristling with familiar fantasy elements like knights, dragons, halflings, and forbidden tomes. Even dedicated fans of the genre will be taken aback by the weight of his realm’s history and culture, which at best resembles a glittering, medieval still life. Unfortunately, those seeking an emotional payoff from Hahn’s mountainous vignettes, which rotate among Judgement, Haltar’s band, and a few others, will need patience to complete the journey. Hahn writes to conjure atmosphere, not speed toward conclusions, and the pleasure resides in lines like “[The warrior’s] words came in harsh, uneven shards as if his speech had been shaken and broken up inside his armor.” Frustratingly, despite this volume’s name, the last page ends with “to be continued.”
An ambitiously realized world dampened by an unfocused plot.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Independent Boolworm
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
