An imaginative collection that puts a modern spin on beloved fairy tales and myths.
This eclectic volume of short stories explores familiar and futuristic landscapes through characters that love, yearn, ache, and make sacrifices.
In “Book of Shadows,” a young woman casts a spell to bring her father back from the dead, promising years of her life in exchange. Although her wish is granted, she immediately realizes she’s made a fatal mistake. “I’d known the price was part of my life,” Sandy remarks after her final conversation with her father. “I’d just thought I had more life to trade.” Ariane, an insectlike priestess in “Minotaur,” must set aside her religious beliefs and the interests of her race, the fictional Mirosians, when she falls in love with a human prisoner destined to be fed to the Goddess. True to speculative fiction, the tales explore time travel, government conspiracies, and the inner lives of androids, but the characters always feel relatable because of the dangers they face. Mythical monsters appear in these pages along with the real—and therefore even more horrific—terrors of everyday life: unemployment, rent bills, fear of abandonment, and loneliness. While Dallas is ravaged by a hurricane and the subsequent power outages in “Saving Alan Idle,” a disabled programmer named Eileen Yu struggles to rescue her laptop, which contains her greatest creation, an artificial intelligence named Alan. Alan in turn looks back at Eileen’s life, wondering how using a wheelchair has deprived her of intimacy and friendship. “In Sickness and in Health,” one of the best stories in Villyard’s collection, follows an android named Robbie who goes to extreme lengths pretending to be human to provide for his dying owner, Lydia Anderson. Love appears as little moments of empathy and connection across species, as when Robbie asks Lydia what it was like to be a child and she responds: “Days were longer then….There was joy in play that lasted for hours and hours. And it was safe.” The less successful tales in this volume rush through the events without concern for character development or, like “Toads and Roses,” appear to be simple retellings of familiar plots from children’s books.
An imaginative collection that puts a modern spin on beloved fairy tales and myths.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2022
ISBN: 9798986833019
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A well-constructed and enjoyable conclusion.
In the conclusion to the Emily Wilde trilogy, a Cambridge professor of dryadology—faerie studies—prepares to live her research as never before.
Previously, in Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (2024), Emily poisoned Queen Arna, the usurping stepmother of her faerie-prince fiance, Wendell Bambleby, and found a gate to Wendell’s lost kingdom; naturally, the process of establishing a new monarchy in a quixotic faerie realm will be far from smooth. Unfortunately, Arna is not quite dead; she is using her poisoned, liminal state to blight the very landscape. Emily must employ her specific mortal skills (academic research and unrelenting resolve) to find the faerie lore that best describes their current situation, picking out the clues within scraps of old tales to locate the hidden, dying queen, and deal with her in a way that doesn’t lead to further damage. Although much of what she learns is grim, Emily forges on, determined to discover the path to a happy ending for herself and Wendell, where she can be the faerie queen she never imagined she’d be (and is frankly quite uncomfortable being). Thankfully, this concluding volume isn’t the feared retread of the previous two, both of which involved Emily’s research in remote European locations and her efforts to get on with the human locals, even while her obvious neurospiciness and deep understanding of rules allow her to deal with faeries more effectively than most mortals can. This installment makes effective callbacks to the previous two, while moving the story forward as Emily, despite the concerns of her mortal friends, tries to make a place for herself in a dangerous new world where not all of her subjects are prepared to take her seriously. Janet of Carterhaugh merely had to drag her lover Tam Lin from a horse to secure her happiness from a vengeful faerie queen; Emily has to put in real work, using her brain and plunging into physical danger to earn her future. The result is far more satisfying and believable, despite being mainly set in a fantastical world.
A well-constructed and enjoyable conclusion.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593500224
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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