A gripping if sometimes-formulaic fantasy about a thief and a warlock navigating a tense relationship.
Linde presents the second installment in her ongoing urban fantasy series starring a daring young thief.
Following her 2024 book The Wren in the Holly Library, the author continues the adventures of her main character Kierse, a young woman whose New York City stomping grounds are suffused with supernatural beings and maintains a tense peace thanks to the Monster Treaty (the book’s standard fantasy-novel map depicts a mystically transformed Manhattan). In the previous book, Kierse met a charismatic but forbidding warlock named Graves under perilous circumstances; readers wanting more of their tense, combustible relationship will be happy to see Graves return in this sequel. Again, Kierse must undertake a daring theft; again, things go wrong, and when Graves saves her, she’s obliged to undertake a mission for him, despite her bitter feelings (“For a time, she’d even thought she could read him when no one else could,” readers are told. “How wrong she had been”). Graves is a powerful figure, but Kierse has magic of her own: To a point, she can absorb and simply ignore magic spells and potions. This a great advantage for a thief, but will it be enough for the epic adventure Graves assigns her, particularly when some of her enemies are dead set on destroying the Monster Treaty once and for all? Thanks to Linde’s tremendous narrative energy, readers will certainly want to learn the answer to that question—like its predecessor, this is a very readable, page-turning adventure story. There is a fair amount of lazy, slangy, or cliched language to contend with (like a mention of “dark bedroom eyes,” or characters saying “showtime” before they go into action), and it seems like every fourth word in the text is an f-bomb. Despite these flaws, the electricity between Kierse and Graves is captivating throughout.
A gripping if sometimes-formulaic fantasy about a thief and a warlock navigating a tense relationship.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781649378521
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled: Red Tower Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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