Astonishing, brutal, and beautifully constructed, with a powerful emotional punch; an exceptionally accomplished debut.
This debut contemporary fantasy cleverly blends Chinese and First Nations folklore with a famous Child Ballad into a tale about one young woman/magical tiger’s journey toward accepting herself and averting an apocalypse.
After her tiger father died in a mysterious car crash, Tamara Lin fell more heavily under the dark influence of his sister, Aunt Tigress, who only reluctantly accepted her exodus from China to Canada. Cut off from her familiar sources of magic, Aunt Tigress has always been determined to seize power from the First Nations supernatural forces, however resistant they are to giving it up. After her unwitting complicity in one such conflict, Tam literally cut all ties with her aunt, severing their mystical bond with scissors, and has tried to behave as much like a human as she can. But now, Tam is being menaced by a mysterious creature, and Aunt Tigress has apparently been murdered. If she is to discover the true nature of what threatens her, Tam will have to embrace the more mystical and violent aspects of her being and potentially threaten her budding relationship with Janet, a human classmate who has a link to Tam’s troubled history with her aunt. The person with a terrible past who’s trying to redeem themself is a common trope. Such characters typically cope by being cold and/or stoic, or by making an effortful attempt at kindness and serenity. Here, the protagonist’s attempts to smother her dreadful guilt and bloody impulses result in anxiety and shyness. Tam thinks she wants to be invisible, but the world—and her essential self—won’t let her do it. The result is a more interesting and far more genuine individual; the stakes for Tam’s integrity and love life seem far more fraught, and the violent acts that occur are more deeply felt. The mix of cultures and mythologies in this novel is truly unique, and the reader is also left to wonder until nearly the very end if Tam and her family really are physical tigers who can assume something like a human form, or whether something more metaphysical is involved.
Astonishing, brutal, and beautifully constructed, with a powerful emotional punch; an exceptionally accomplished debut.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780756419387
Page Count: 432
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
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
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