The novel adroitly explores the healing power of storytelling in a high-fantasy setting.
Bregar’s SF/fantasy tale of an unlikely hero who uses his life experiences and storytelling to inspire his comrades.
Stick begins with Eddigan, an elderly one-eyed wizard with diminished powers who lives alone in a forest with a raven. Eddigan’s hermit-like existence delays his inevitable surrender to the Arcansil, “the abandonment of magic, […] a process that strips the arcane from all magical beings” which is tearing its way through Eddigan’s Draywood Forest and the Celt-lands as a whole. The Arcansil causes beings with arcane powers to lose their minds, abandon their beliefs, and eventually turn violent and feral. On a supply run, Eddigan and the raven discover and rescue a diminutive being attacked by feral faeries on the road and take him back to Eddigan’s cottage to recover. This person is Jacqaan “Stick” Maalik of Dorveth, member of the near-mythical Terralin civilization of “smallfolk” with gold-ringed eyes and webbed fingers. (While not belonging to the same universe, the Terralin may remind readers of the River Folk in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.) When Stick claims to be the last of the living Terralin (and near death himself), Eddigan urges Stick to share his life story to “keep them alive a little longer.” Stick agrees, and over long evenings of storytelling he shares how his people’s persistent love of peace in the face of clear threats eventually led to their enslavement. Stick has witnessed atrocities, and many of his loved ones have died horrible deaths, but he remains tender in his retelling. In the present-day Draywood, the Arcansil continues to take its toll on Eddigan, which leads to additional horrors between tellings (readers beware: There is animal death, and caretakers/patients with memory-related illnesses should steel themselves). Nevertheless, the stubborn resilience on display in Stick is softened by a sense of love and mutual care. An era may be ending—Stick’s life, Eddigan’s, the magic in the world—but Eddigan and Stick believe that life is precious even when time is short, and “it is better to know” than to turn away from their painful histories.
The novel adroitly explores the healing power of storytelling in a high-fantasy setting.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 978-0996594240
Page Count: 292
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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