Mind-expanding fantasy and SF.
A royal minister in disfavor is ordered to complete a tyrannical queen’s prized project in Barsukov’s fantasy novel.
In an unspecified realm where medieval elements combine with a culture approaching (but not quite reaching) a “steampunk” level of development, Lord Shea Ashcroft is a royal minister who has defied an order by the all-powerful but rarely seen Queen Daelyn to use a gas weapon on protesters. Thus, Ashcroft is demoted to an assignment to ensure completion of Daelyn’s ruinously ambitious legacy project: a soaring tower in Owenbeg, a province bordering on the rival nation of Duma. Though ostensibly a defense against “skyrafts,” the massive edifice seems more an arrogant affirmation of royal power than anything else (its toll, in human and financial terms, triggered the protests in the first place). To keep the structure standing and growing, its chief engineer Brielle has had to resort to accepting aid from the “Drakiri”; these are members of a strange, secretive minority—equipped with advanced, incomprehensible technologies—whose origins are now obscure even to them. Among their most prized pieces of tech are “tulips,” oval devices that can counteract gravity. If not wielded properly, a tulip can cause a drastic implosion, destructively pulling everything in range inward. Brielle’s desperate deployment of tulips throughout the tower leads to catastrophic failures and losses of life—but are these accidents or acts of sabotage? Haunted by the death of his sister Lena in a childhood tulip incident, Ashcroft gets close to a Drakiri woman (coincidentally also called Lena) and learns that a Drakiri superstition predicts the advent of a frightful “Mimic Tower” that will materialize if the tulip-assisted tower of Daelyn continues to persist. Assassination attempts and intrigues at court seed a trail ultimately leading Ashcroft into Duma itself, where the Cold War–like animosity between the two kingdoms takes on literally cosmos-bending proportions.
Readers may be tempted to make analogies between the Drakiri and Jews or Romany people, or to compare the Drakiri devices to the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, another apocalyptic power grimly unleashed in a Slavic setting. But these analogs only go so far as the narrative reaches a metaphysical denouement that goes outside the realm of conventional reality to explicate the tale’s vagueness regarding time, place, physics, and even the reason that Queen Daelyn’s capital remains nameless. Some of this material was originally released as an award-winning novella, Tower of Mud and Straw (2021). In this volume,Barsukov has added a follow-up, City of Spires, City of Seagulls, forming a whole that answers many of the original narrative’s questions, however cryptically. There are similarities to Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series (though without anything near the marathon page count) as well as to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven (1971) and the work of sibling Russian masters Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Barsukov’s storyline becomes quite challenging to follow in the narrative’s latter half, in which plot threads diverge to follow Shea, Brielle, and (via rather conveniently recovered diary entries) the Drakiri Lena, but the payoff is worth the effort. The author’s prose is rarely less than lyrical and poetic (“The balcony windows brought in the smells of autumn’s brandy: smoke from the burning leaves, damp earth, the rotting perfume of forgotten things”). Highly recommended for fans of high fantasy and SF wishing to tread in especially exotic territory.
Mind-expanding fantasy and SF.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781647101367
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Caezik SF & Fantasy
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
