A poetic and wondrous SF tale that grapples with gender and faith.
A young star gardener embarks on a religious pilgrimage in this debut space opera.
In a distant, seven-gendered future, where time can move fast or slow depending on one’s position, Vanu Francoeur lives where stars are born. Vanu, who uses zhe/hir pronouns, is a Novice member of the Kinship of the Suffering God, a religious community. The Kinship inhabits the Annex, a space station floating in the Plenum Star Nursery. Vanu is right on the cusp of adulthood and, as such, will soon be a full member of the Kinship, though zhe still doesn’t quite understand the nature of God or the complexities of tending to the Star Nursery. Two strange occurrences arise to shake up Vanu’s world. The first is a sexual encounter with a female visitor to the Annex that proves controversial among the other members of Vanu’s community. The second is a dream vision of darkness that excites and awakens hir spiritual self. The two may in fact be related: According to one of Vanu’s superiors, people are more receptive to visions after a sexual encounter. The Kinship’s reaction to Vanu’s relationship causes hir to question if zhe will find what zhe needs in its teachings—like the mystery of the song sung by a space-inhabiting descendant of Old Earth’s whales. In this novel, Edwards not only creates a rich world, but renders it in vivid, lyrical prose as well. Vanu looks at a nebula “as a creature of the deep might stare towards the distant lights of the surface. The pastel ceiling was intercut with dark bands and splashes of varicoloured luminosity, violets, pinks and yellows, shapes that echoed hir inner turmoil, the fires of space frozen in time.” The vocabulary takes some getting used to, though there is a certain logic to much of it (the descendants of whales are known as jonahs), and the author helpfully includes a glossary in the back. This is only the first installment of a 15-volume SF series following five far-future subcultures. While that may seem like an intimidating prospect, Edwards demonstrates an imagination befitting an epic on that scale.
A poetic and wondrous SF tale that grapples with gender and faith.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Untimely Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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