Astonishing, brutal, and beautifully constructed, with a powerful emotional punch; an exceptionally accomplished debut.
This debut contemporary fantasy cleverly blends Chinese and First Nations folklore with a famous Child Ballad into a tale about one young woman/magical tiger’s journey toward accepting herself and averting an apocalypse.
After her tiger father died in a mysterious car crash, Tamara Lin fell more heavily under the dark influence of his sister, Aunt Tigress, who only reluctantly accepted her exodus from China to Canada. Cut off from her familiar sources of magic, Aunt Tigress has always been determined to seize power from the First Nations supernatural forces, however resistant they are to giving it up. After her unwitting complicity in one such conflict, Tam literally cut all ties with her aunt, severing their mystical bond with scissors, and has tried to behave as much like a human as she can. But now, Tam is being menaced by a mysterious creature, and Aunt Tigress has apparently been murdered. If she is to discover the true nature of what threatens her, Tam will have to embrace the more mystical and violent aspects of her being and potentially threaten her budding relationship with Janet, a human classmate who has a link to Tam’s troubled history with her aunt. The person with a terrible past who’s trying to redeem themself is a common trope. Such characters typically cope by being cold and/or stoic, or by making an effortful attempt at kindness and serenity. Here, the protagonist’s attempts to smother her dreadful guilt and bloody impulses result in anxiety and shyness. Tam thinks she wants to be invisible, but the world—and her essential self—won’t let her do it. The result is a more interesting and far more genuine individual; the stakes for Tam’s integrity and love life seem far more fraught, and the violent acts that occur are more deeply felt. The mix of cultures and mythologies in this novel is truly unique, and the reader is also left to wonder until nearly the very end if Tam and her family really are physical tigers who can assume something like a human form, or whether something more metaphysical is involved.
Astonishing, brutal, and beautifully constructed, with a powerful emotional punch; an exceptionally accomplished debut.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780756419387
Page Count: 432
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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