Let your path lead you to the Nightside series, which has everything—real wit, personalities, plot, invention—that this book...
Another in Green's Secret Histories series about Eddie Drood, aka Shaman Bond (For Heaven's Eyes Only, 2011, etc.), set in the same universe as his Nightside yarns and occasionally intersecting with them.
The Drood family protects humanity against such outside threats as the Hungry Gods and the Apocalypse Door. Droods in good standing with the family are gifted with various superpowers and an impenetrable suit of golden armor that manifests on demand. Some time ago Eddie left Drood Hall and became a field agent operating in London. This time, arriving at Drood Hall with his girlfriend/sidekick Molly Metcalf, a powerful witch, Eddie is aghast to find the heavily defended ancestral pile an utter ruin; even his armor no longer works. After surveying the wreckage, and pocketing the Merlin Glass, a handy space/time wormhole, Eddie realizes that this isn't his Hall at all, but a duplicate. The real Hall has been sent—somewhere—by means of the dimensional engine Alpha Red Alpha, to which only a family traitor could have had access. Hundreds of pages slouch by while Eddie and Molly indulge in numbing banter and Eddie enlarges on his powerful and noble and complicated and entirely too numerous family. Finally, he decides without any evidence that the culprit must be Crow Lee, the Most Evil Man in the World. In order to track down Crow Lee, however, our heroes must find their way to the Department of the Uncanny, where the Regent of Shadows is sure to know Lee's whereabouts. What action there is consists mostly of bodies of various shapes and sizes exploding into gobbets of flesh and sprays of blood, and for even the most avid readers this sort of thing quickly palls.
Let your path lead you to the Nightside series, which has everything—real wit, personalities, plot, invention—that this book does not.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-46452-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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