More stabs, grabs, and snarky confabs, with rising stakes to push readers on.
The fates of Earth and the intergalactic community alike come to hang in the balance amid visions of doom in this middle volume.
Picking up without a recap where Ashfall Legacy (2021) left off, half-human Syd and his multispecies squad of allies, reluctant and otherwise, flee but are ultimately forced to turn and face Capt. Reno and her associates. They, being full humans and therefore superstrong and (so they think) invulnerable everywhere except on Earth, violently believe that they are destined to rule rather than being genocidally wiped out. Even readers fresh from the opener may have trouble picking up the basic premise and the backstory, but that doesn’t really matter as the pseudonymous authors stick to an easy-to-follow “spaceship chases and captures with occasional explosions in a pint-sized universe” sort of plot and give a cast featuring aliens diverse enough to include sentient gas and fungus plenty of chances to exchange banter and values. All of the actual agency continues to come from human or part-human characters who are, notwithstanding an impassive one with a Japanese name, uniformly White-presenting. A climactic battle leaves the human supremacist party at least neutralized, but thanks to an enigmatic space monster’s “flickering whorls of temporal energy,” troubling glimpses of a future Syd destroying a planet that looks a lot like ours leaves some unfinished business for sequels to settle.
More stabs, grabs, and snarky confabs, with rising stakes to push readers on. (Science fiction. 13-17)Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-284539-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Bound to be popular.
A suddenly trendy trope—conflict and romance between members of conquering and enslaved races—enlivened by fantasy elements loosely drawn from Arabic tradition (another trend!).
In an original, well-constructed fantasy world (barring some lazy naming), the Scholars have lived under Martial rule for 500 years, downtrodden and in many cases enslaved. Scholar Laia has spent a lifetime hiding her connection to the Resistance—her parents were its leaders—but when her grandparents are killed and her brother’s captured by Masks, the eerie, silver-faced elite soldiers of the Martial Empire, Laia must go undercover as a slave to the terrifying Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy, where Martials are trained for battle. Meanwhile, Elias, the Commandant’s not-at-all-beloved son, wants to run away from Blackcliff, until he is named an Aspirant for the throne by the mysterious red-eyed Augurs. Predictably, action, intrigue, bloodshed and some pounding pulses follow; there’s betrayal and a potential love triangle or two as well. Sometimes-lackluster prose and a slight overreliance on certain kinds of sexual violence as a threat only slightly diminish the appeal created by familiar (but not predictable) characters and a truly engaging if not fully fleshed-out fantasy world.
Bound to be popular. (Fantasy. 13 & up)Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59514-803-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Returning fans, anyway, will pounce.
Houck kicks off a new story arc in the world of the Tiger’s Curse series with new tigers who live in a northerly setting.
The death of their widowed royal mother touches off a crisis in the Kievian Empire; neither Stacia nor Verusha Stepanov, 17-year-old sword-wielding twin sisters, wants to be named tsarina. But questions of succession get put on hold when a battle with a sorcerer inexplicably turns the two into nonspeaking Siberian tigers. Hints of a cure send them, along with a growing entourage of men to provide assistance (and, perforce, do all the talking), on a long trek. Though most of the cast sticks to genre type, Houck throws in a wild card in the form of hunky, inarticulate Nikolai, who joins the quest because he is enthralled by Verusha—and who also killed his whole family in an act of revenge. Occasional anachronistic dialogue (e.g., “Are you ready, ladies?”) disrupts the tale’s generally earnest tone, as do the clumsy attempts at banter. A third tiger, snarky and blind but conveniently able to see through others’ eyes, trots in late in the story. The events in this setup volume unfold with many a flashback and change in point of view and head toward no sort of resolution—only the cave-dwelling White Shaman of the Tundra’s advice that further journeys are in the offing. The central cast in this Russian-inspired fantasy world presents white; the Indigenous population includes nomadic reindeer herders.
Returning fans, anyway, will pounce. (Fantasy. 13-16)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798212221696
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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