by Daniel Draym ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2020
A panoramic, detail-driven historical fantasy that delivers plenty of heroes to root for.
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This fantasy debut features a team that hunts monsters from parallel realms during World War I.
It is 1914, and the well-dressed Countess Mathilde von Covey is attending a meeting of “seditious Bosnian Serbs” in Sarajevo’s Kafe Zemljak. There, she encounters the diminutive Gavrilo Princip. He intends to make his mark on history, and, after falling under Covey’s strange spell, he hears her say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Princip goes on to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which instigates the Great War. Covey isn’t merely alluring, she’s possessed by the Dream Whisperer, an interdimensional being capable of manipulating human hosts, dreams, and global events. The creature’s true goal is to awaken the Sleepers, unearthly beasts that will act in concert as gate openers, ultimately allowing the Outer Gods to return and breed chaos. A handful of talented individuals have committed to stopping Covey, including Cmdr. Fleming of the British Secret Service; Mycroft Holmes, brother of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes; and Dr. Rebecca Mumm of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. When Covey succeeds in waking two Sleepers, Fleming helps destroy them. The heroes then use a rare travel guide by esoteric scholar Friedrich von Junzt to locate temples in Borneo, Bolivia, and elsewhere that house dormant Sleepers. To protect against interlopers, Covey keeps her manservant, the hulking Moloch, nearby. Yet should anything happen to the Dream Whisperer’s current body, he can always jump to another.
Draym’s series opener is a deep crawl through the historical trenches, the first half of which covers the years 1914 to 1917 before jumping to 1921. Much like Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels, this adventure peppers keen-eyed readers with references to everything from Jack the Ripper to 1908’s Tunguska event. Mycroft is a wonderful presence who at one point explains that Arthur Conan Doyle invented the nonexistent Watson to “offset my brother’s brilliance.” Throughout the book, whenever Draym sets a scene, readers are treated to a colossal amount of historical background. Realistic portraits of battlefields like Ypres make the ensuing supernatural moments that much more exciting. The author shows the same impressive flair for bringing believable science to the narrative. After studying a Sleeper’s corpse, Mumm says: “The cell walls are exceptionally rigid,” as in fungi, and yet “one would expect polysaccharides in there as long-chain polymers like chitin.” Readers also get the pulpy descriptions that help any genre piece sing (“A viscous, fluorescent, green liquid was dripping from one of seven eye-sockets”). Truly unexpected is Fleming’s elf lineage. His grandmother wishes for him to join the elves as they slip from Earth—via breaches in reality—because of humanity’s destructive “perpetual economic growth.” Mumm is also gracefully realized as someone who prefers the beauty of nature to that of a church. When the Dream Whisperer does initiate the novel’s most predictable twist, it’s nevertheless thrillingly executed. Draym makes the right choice to skip 1918 and the influenza years. This allows the story to halt in 1921, with the promise of darker horrors, both real and H.P. Lovecraft–inspired, to come.
A panoramic, detail-driven historical fantasy that delivers plenty of heroes to root for.Pub Date: March 29, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-63-158374-0
Page Count: 567
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PROFILES
by V.E. Schwab ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2025
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
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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
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PERSPECTIVES
by Rebecca Yarros ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2023
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
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