A gritty, entertaining, and intriguing mix of history and fantasy, with a formidable female lead.
A high-action adventure set on the ancient Eurasian Steppe, where nomadic tribes battled one another and encroaching Greek colonists for dominance over the land.
Five centuries before the Common Era, Anaiti, daughter of a Rokhalani princess and the Bastarnai King, is to be given by her father in marriage to the elderly Ariapaithi, King of the Skythians. Trained by her mother’s people to be independent, Anaiti has no interest in being a wife and mother. She has agreed to the arrangement to ensure peace between the Bastarnai kingdom and the Skythians. She is what the Greeks call an hamazon, or amazon, a member of the feared Rokhalani tribe of tall, fierce women. Although the Bastarnai are a farming tribe who have settled on the border of the Steppe, the Rokhalani are nomadic, and Anaiti has a passion for the open wildness of the steppe. She is mentally and physically devoted to the hamazon ethic, a commitment that was sealed many years ago when her right breast was ceremonially cauterized to improve her archery skills. But there’s a problem: Although Anaiti is a skillful rider and is highly adept in archery, she’s never killed an enemy. Among both tribes, no warrior is to be married before first accomplishing this feat. Ariapaithi proposes a compromise: “She’ll ride with our men as they patrol the marches and return when she has a scalp. When she makes her kill, I’ll make her my wife.” Anaiti willingly accepts this challenge; it’s a way to postpone marriage. Ariapaithi assigns protection of her life and virtue while living among the male warriors of the steppe to his youngest son, Aric, “Warden of the East March and Kara-Daranaka of the kingdom’s most sacred warband.” And so begins a yearlong saga of a relationship between Anaiti and Aric that grows in intensity, loyalty, and dangerous intimacy.
The Skythians are portrayed in history as a fearsome, bloodthirsty band of savages with exceptional archery skills while astride a horse. Elliott’s mission, however, is to limn the humanity of the tribe. The pages abound with gruesome battles, but there’s also loyalty and friendship, a devotion to the land and their gods, and poignancy. Elliott is herself a horse trainer, and many of her most tender passages concern Anaiti’s love and unique understanding of horses. There’s also humor tucked into deft prose, amusingly peppered with standard modern four-letter curse words. Plus, there are dozens of philosophical debates between Anaiti and the Skythians about the nature and rules of the universe. Still, make no mistake, this is not an adventure for the squeamish. The land, climate, and culture leave no room for the weak. Violence and death hide behind every turn in the road and sometimes within the tribe itself (“Grabbing a fistful of his hair, he pulled back the man’s head and sliced open his throat, spraying me with a shower of hot blood”). The final pages of this first volume of a projected trilogy intentionally leave readers guessing what will come next.
A gritty, entertaining, and intriguing mix of history and fantasy, with a formidable female lead.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781966394013
Page Count: 502
Publisher: Warden Tree Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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