Intriguing worldbuilding can’t compensate for two-dimensional lead characters and a lackluster primary storyline.
The first installment of Stewart’s Hollow Covenant trilogy is set in a fantasy world where humans have destroyed the planet’s sustainability—and magic—and feuding gods do battle to restore the world.
After humans selfishly consume much of the magic on the planet, the Shattering changes everyone who lives in its various realms. Kluehnn—who called himself the “one true god”—makes a pact with his followers after hunting down and killing most of the other deities. He will systematically restore each realm back to its pristine environmental state, but half the population will be “altered to suit the new landscape.” The other half will be destroyed, their matter used to reshape the terrain. As the country of Kashan is being forcibly restored by a relentless black wall sweeping over the land, chaos ensues as people attempt to escape. Fifteen-year-old Hakara desperately tries to save herself and her little sister, Rasha, but they are separated in the turmoil. Hakara awakes safely in the neighboring realm, but her sister’s fate is unknown. An environmental cautionary tale blended with an impressively intricate fantasy backstory, the premise here is strong, as are the multiple intertwining storylines exploring a diversity of perspectives. The problem is with the major plot thread revolving around the two sisters’ search for one another—particularly Hakara’s obsession with crossing the barrier to the transformed Kashan to find Rasha, who may be dead or altered. The intensity is initially high, but it loses power quickly as secondary characters and storylines take over. Compared to fully realized and impressively complex characters like Thassir, an emotionally scarred god in disguise; Mullayne, an explorer in search of Unterra, the mythical subterranean home of the gods before the Shattering; and the courageous Sheuan Sim, who must use her wits and savvy to survive an impossible situation that puts her entire clan at risk, the sisters are unremarkable.
Intriguing worldbuilding can’t compensate for two-dimensional lead characters and a lackluster primary storyline.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780316564892
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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