A grand entertainment, in a tale with many strands, by an ascended master of modern legends.
Rushdie returns to the realm of magic realism and to the India of his birth.
Vijayanagar, or Victory City, was a real place, the seat of a powerful empire that occupied most of southern India. Rushdie borrows from history to depict siblings and their families who’d stop at little to gain power; as one of his interlocutors, a European explorer, spits, “I wrote in my journal that Deva Raya and his murderous brothers only cared about getting drunk and fucking. I should have added, and killing one another.” Rushdie places this history within a web of mythology: His Vijayanagar is the creation of a goddess-channeling girl named Pampa Kampana, most of whose 247-year-long life is devoted to creating the city, populating it, and then trying, usually to little avail, to keep the place from falling into chaos. Pampa has a mission: Witnessing her mother’s purdah, she is resolved to “laugh at death and turn her face toward life.” Alas, she learns, life is complicated and, as Rushdie winks, “deity’s bounty was always a two-edged sword.” Like Pampa Kampana, Rushdie has a fine old time of worldbuilding, creating a vast space in which glittering palaces and smoky temples stand in contrast with mangroves and wildernesses ruled by “tigers as big as a house.” Throughout, Pampa moves between royals, having “achieved the unusual feat of being queen...in two successive reigns, the consort of consecutive kings, who were also brothers,” while taking time to craft a verse epic recounting her creation—an epic that, as will happen, is lost for centuries. Rushdie reflects throughout on the nature of history and storytelling, with Pampa Kampana’s creations learning who they are only through the “imaginary narrative” that is whispered to them as they sleep and with Vijayanagar’s rulers, along with their subjects, the victims of historical amnesia who “exist now only in words.
A grand entertainment, in a tale with many strands, by an ascended master of modern legends.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-24339-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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