Fun and clever, but decidedly sloppier than it should be.
In the final installment of a trilogy, a guard captain turned hero plots the final confrontation with an evil sorcerer seeking divinity.
The Witch-king of Hakkia gathers an army of soldiers, mercenaries, vampires, and beasts brutally altered by magic, intending to bring the rebellious kingdoms of the destroyed Silver Empire to heel. He also prepares for an elaborate, painful ritual that will transform him into a demigod and bring his patron, Hastur the Shepherd God, into the physical world. Meanwhile, the former imperial guard captain Kagen the Damned helps rally a response and stop the ritual, while his brothers, Jheklan and Faulker, go on a dangerous journey into the Winterwilds to free the world’s last dragon, Fabeldyr, the imprisoned and tortured source of all the world’s magic. The ending, as armies clash, the ritual advances, and divine and monstrous beings enter our reality, goes pretty much as anyone who reads or watches fantasy would expect, although the clarification of the Witch-king’s identity is a nice twist. But, like the previous books, this one could have used a more rigorous editor. Characters behave inconsistently. It's not entirely clear whether the Witch-king’s ultimate goal is to reestablish an empire, conquer all of reality, or shatter all of reality—he says different things at different times. Several plot threads prove to be dead ends; the magic books won at such great cost in the last volume, Son of the Poison Rose (2023), end up being of little utility. Other aspects are never completely explained, possibly by design? We never learn if Kagen is truly damned; it’s heavily suggested that there might be another meaning to his gods turning their backs to him in Book 1, Kagen the Damned (2022), plus his interactions with other beings seem to convey blessing, not damnation, but it’s not fully explained. The book, and the series as a whole, offers an intriguing mashup of epic fantasy and cosmic horror lore and tropes, exciting action sequences, and interesting, sympathetic characters. But the potential to be a tighter work is clearly there, if only the time and the effort had been put in.
Fun and clever, but decidedly sloppier than it should be.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781250892638
Page Count: 592
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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