Fantasy fans will likely enjoy Anya’s adventures, which feature novel supernatural elements in a modern setting.
Finnish-Australian author Kuivalainen offers a debut urban fantasy about a young girl battling dark forces.
After wolves shockingly attack Anya’s grandfather in the middle of summer, she sits grieving in a local café. She lives in a village bordering Russia and Karelia that’s “so small that it didn’t even have an official name,” so she’s naturally surprised when a stranger greets her in English; she’s doubly shocked when he introduces himself as Tuoni, the ruler of the Underworld. He explains to Anya that her grandfather was a shaman with great powers, and that she also has magical ability that “needs to be utilised, or it will not only be a disaster for you but for your whole world.” It turns out that there’s a gate between Earth and the Otherworld, which just so happens to border Anya’s farm. Anya becomes aware that the wolves that killed her grandfather were no ordinary predators, and she knows that her task ahead will be a formidable one. As she confronts evil forces, she’s aided by Yvan, an ancient prince who can transform into a firebird and other supernatural beings that Anya thought only existed in fairy tales. Several characters enjoy drinking alcohol, including Anya, who at one point wants “vodka, anything alcoholic, to calm her scattered nerves.” The book’s dialogue can be both obvious and clunky, as when a character states, “I can’t make you stay but it’s going to be a shit fight and I would feel better having you fighting at my side.” However, the story incorporates a fair share of surprises, and never fails to provide new scenes featuring bloodshed and strange new creatures (“It flopped, bloody as a newborn onto the ground and stretched its wings. It started to cry and grew to the size of a horse”). The beasts, in particular, help this story to move beyond the genre’s many clichés, and their complexity extends well beyond typical fantasy creatures.
Fantasy fans will likely enjoy Anya’s adventures, which feature novel supernatural elements in a modern setting.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1503093881
Page Count: 518
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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