An impassioned story about rage, revenge, and how love can lay it to rest.
Wong debuts with a dark and unpredictable story, valiant worldbuilding, and a troubled protagonist who fights like hell.
Alma Ben is the rage-filled bastard child of an aristocrat of House Avera—one of the four noble lineages in Kugara possessing the abilities of the gods. But Alma, raised by her outcast single mother in the countryside, doesn’t know of her station, and has a lonely and isolating childhood, often conjuring an imaginary friend for comfort. When her mother falls terminally ill, Alma manages to send word to her unknown father begging for help, and is met with a powerful vessel of the Dread Beast—the god of death. In exchange for her mother’s healing, Alma agrees to serve House Avera in support of her father’s ascension to First Hand of the Beast, and the girl is whisked away by her father while her mother lies dying. Unaware of nearly everything about the gods and the families bound to them, she discovers the first step in service to the House and its deity is severing her arm in sacrifice to the Beast. Despite her actions, her mother dies, but Alma is forced to continue serving her father’s ambitions anyway. As her grief rages and her father’s betrayal is palpable everywhere in the Avera estate, the flames of revenge are fanned by her once-imaginary friend, Aster, who reveals himself to be so much more—a spirit that’s taken on human form. With Aster as proof of her strong connection to the Dread Beast, together they devise a plan to prove her worthiness as a vessel of the Beast and challenge her father’s rank. All that’s required is that she train for a Pilgrimage to the umbral plane—a twisted alternate dimension filled with monsters and terror—to kill a star and rise in rank to become the First Hand of the Beast herself. From the opening pages, with Alma’s arm strapped to a fountain and her father standing overhead with a sword ready to give her limb as an offering, the prose strikes hardest when Wong writes visceral body horror. This page-turning epic continually exposes the monster within each character, pushing them to confront it head-on and fight relentlessly for the good they possess deep within.
An impassioned story about rage, revenge, and how love can lay it to rest.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9780063446250
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Devoted series fans will appreciate the added pieces to this expansive narrative puzzle.
After 500 years, the Grief of Ages is a distant memory—until dragons hellbent on destruction begin to wake again.
In this relatively brief prequel to the epic The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019), the kingdoms of Virtudom have experienced centuries of relative peace. Marosa Vetalda, the Princess of Yscalin, spends her days behind castle walls under the gaze of her overprotective father, awaiting the date when she’ll be wed to Aubrecht of Mentendon, her ticket to freedom. While the book’s main focus is initially on the political threads weaving the Western kingdoms together, the frailty of best-laid plans is exposed when evidence of the reemergence of draconic beings reaches castle ears. These tales often come from the cullers who make their living slaying these creatures, and who are often blamed for intentionally waking them for profit. No one alive remembers the Grief of Ages, so no one’s prepared when Fýredel, the great High Western dragon, surfaces from the volcanic mountain that towers ominously over Yscalin’s capital city of Cárscaro. What follows is the backstory of how the devoted Yscali kingdom comes to shift allegiance to Fýredel and his master, the Nameless One, a main catalyst to events in The Priory. Overall, this book reads more like history lesson than fantasy adventure, but the sheer terror that befalls the Yscali people as they face Fýredel’s pure evil is both powerful and relevant. Marosa’s plight further solidifies her as a hero worth remembering; her strength and defiance shine through as hope for the future she’s dreamed of slowly flickers out.
Devoted series fans will appreciate the added pieces to this expansive narrative puzzle.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781639736010
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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