An excellent second installment that adds even more detail and intrigue.
The much-anticipated second book in Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky series finds Serapio, Naranpa, and Xiala scrambling to find their footing after the explosive ending of Black Sun.
Having executed his dark purpose as the Crow God’s human avatar and causing a mysterious eclipse that blocks the sun over the city of Tova, Serapio wakes up gravely injured. One of the giant crows of clan Carrion Crow rescued him, and Okoa, the captain of the Shield, is nursing him back to health. Serapio learns that he can’t necessarily trust everyone from Carrion Crow and also that he will continue to be treated not as a human being but as a weapon for the clan. Xiala, meanwhile, is desperate to find Serapio but is lost in an unfamiliar city and eventually makes some uneasy alliances in order to protect him. And Naranpa, the dethroned Sun Priest, literally crawls out from a tomb and discovers that she and her opposite, Serapio, may not be such opposites after all. The second in a trilogy, this novel does suffer from some inevitable pitfalls. There’s a lot of cleaning up after the end of Book 1 and more setting the stage for what's to come. But even a middle book from Roanhorse is still a book from Roanhorse, with all the excellent plot machinations and stellar prose that readers know to expect from her. She delves further into the political history of the Meridian and saves room for a few big twists to wind up the anticipation for Book 3.
An excellent second installment that adds even more detail and intrigue.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3773-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
AWARDS
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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