A strong debut with soft SF elements offering major crossover appeal for fantasy aficionados.
A polyglot from a colonized moon nation stumbles into a web of interplanetary intrigue when her erstwhile lover is murdered.
Language scholar Enitan Ijebu's appointment as a scribe sent shock waves through the Holy Vaalbaran Empire's religious community. As a native from Koriko, a Vaalbara-colonized moon, Enitan has no legal right to citizenship within the Empire; her homeland has not yet assimilated into Vaalbaran culture at large, which makes her people no more than "savages" in their oppressors' minds. After her older sibling, Xiang, disappears, Enitan suspects foul play, leaving her with no choice but to turn to the one person whose help she doesn't want: Koriko's half-Vaalbaran governor, Ajana Nebaat—her ex-girlfriend. Enitan barely has time to make amends with her ex before the governor is murdered, however. Imperial forces quickly sweep her off to the Vaalbaran capital—a massive, floating structure known as the Splinter—as a scapegoat for the assassination. There, she'll join the recently coronated God-Emperor's court as a political prisoner. Unfortunately for Enitan, the court intrigue begins long before she reaches the Splinter. Emissaries from Vaalbara's biggest enemy, the Ominirish Republic, recruit her as a spy en route to the capital, and the God-Emperor herself, Imperator Menkhet, keeps her close as an "informal advisor" practically from the moment she arrives. Here, Ashing-Giwa constructs a sweeping backdrop for her characters' plights to play out against. The Vaalbarans' personal and political oppression of the Korikese calls to mind European conquests across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Readers will recognize conversations regarding cultural appropriation, the looting of sacred artifacts, slavery, and sexual stereotypes, among other things. Notably, the characters' racial traits cannot be used to distinguish their nation of origin. Enitan is coded as Black, both Xiang and Menkhet have "golden" skin, and many tertiary characters are White. Members of a nonhuman race—the synths, whose existence is outlawed in the Empire—emerge as secondary players in the novel's second half.
A strong debut with soft SF elements offering major crossover appeal for fantasy aficionados.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781668008478
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
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