A stylish urban fantasy with fully realized characters.
A down-and-out warlock tries to help his estranged brother in this debut fantasy.
Adam Binder has always been different. He’s gay, for one, which wasn’t the easiest way to grow up in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He also has the Sight, which allows him to perceive the Other Side: the paranormal world of elves, demons, and lizard people hidden from most humans. To others, of course, he just seems disturbed, which is why his older brother, Robert, convinced his mother, Tilla Mae, to put Adam in a mental health facility when he was a teenager. Released two years ago when he turned 18, Adam has since become an independent detective of sorts. He’s been hunting down and destroying dark artifacts—objects like dice or pool cues constructed with magic materials—in order to trace their creator, a warlock who Adam believes may be his missing father. When Adam’s not battling the forces of darkness, he’s staying with his great aunt Sue in an Oklahoma trailer park, broke and underemployed due to his lack of a GED diploma. Unbeknown to him, things are about to change. He’s just received a text from his brother, who—finally acknowledging Adam’s supernatural gift—needs help with some crazy disturbances revolving around Robert’s wife, Annie, who has recently been behaving quite strangely. Despite their past differences, Adam agrees to help the couple. Family is family, after all. But when Adam gets to Denver, he discovers that the problem is much larger than Annie: A dark force is corrupting people across the city. The nemesis is a lot bigger than an amateur warlock like Adam is equipped to handle. He finds an unlikely partner in Vic Martinez, a police officer whose life Adam saves, inadvertently binding the two men together. In order to salvage his relationship with his relatives—if he really even wants to—Adam will first have to figure out a way to save them.
In this series opener, Slayton’s prose, which shifts between Adam’s and Robert’s points of view, is expressive yet controlled. Here, Adam ruminates on Tilla Mae’s role in his hospitalization: “His mother hadn’t stopped Bobby from locking him up. Hell, she’d signed the papers. And she hadn’t listened, hadn’t stopped the drugs, the tests, or the endless counseling sessions and group therapy, which had been the worst of it. He’d absorbed the horrors of the others and he’d fled further and further into the spirit world.” Adam is a wonderfully sympathetic protagonist, in part because so many of his conflicts with the world around him have nothing to do with fantasy. He’s poor, gay, abandoned by his family, and treated as if he’s crazy by nonmagical people. The Sight doesn’t have to be a metaphor for anything—everything is right on the page—and yet it works perfectly as a complementary attribute for someone who moves regularly through different spaces. The fantasy elements are familiar but fresh; the pacing is urgent; and the relationship between any two characters is usually more than a little bit fraught. Readers will wait with anticipation for further adventures in this rich underworld.
A stylish urban fantasy with fully realized characters.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-406796-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
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