This novel will bend and twist your notion of what love is, while leaving you utterly bewitched.
A woman marked by a family curse has a chance to rewrite her fate—but not without making a bargain with darkness.
Centuries ago, a being is born from the shadows, the product of a ritual, and roams in search of light from souls to feed its darkness. The being eats its first soul and takes the soul’s human form, becoming Miriam Richter. Fast forward to 1576 when Cybil Harding is born “under inauspicious stars,” the first daughter who, according to family lore, is cursed to be a witch and bring nothing but destruction. Cybil’s father, a man of magic himself, is heavily influenced by the Reformation and believes his magic to be the spreading of miracles. Cybil, then, is a dark spot in his vision. When witchcraft becomes a death sentence in England, her father takes matters into his own hands. Using the same ritual as his forefathers, he summons a spirit of the darkness to do his bidding—Miriam. Emboldened by the brightest soul she has ever seen—Cybil’s—Miriam wants her above all else. Cybil is less than willing to give up her soul to darkness when she has barely had a chance to live. Thus begins a unique game of cat and mouse: “We are light and darkness, you and I. There is no choice. Eventually, one of us must destroy the other.” Cybil’s realization of her supernatural potential is juxtaposed against the fury of men at her mere existence. Miriam sees her opportunity to offer Cybil a deal, a life free from the bonds of her curse. But wagering a deal with darkness comes with unimaginable consequences, and Cybil’s soul is destined for a journey of lifetimes. Siegel uses her skills as a writer of historical fiction to highlight the changing form of oppression against women across centuries, while infusing a compelling supernatural arc that makes this story one to remember. Cybil’s journey is one of oppression, self-discovery, violence, and love, these dichotomies most simply summed up by the struggle of light versus darkness. Cybil and Miriam’s deeply complicated bond shows the human side of evil and the dark side of love. Despite her story’s grand scope, Siegel has written something both ugly and beautiful in the most human of ways.
This novel will bend and twist your notion of what love is, while leaving you utterly bewitched.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780063418028
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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