Dark Breakers by C. S. E. Cooney has been racking up rave reviews faster than we can keep track of them. (Admittedly, a new-ish day job has distracted me!) Here is a belated attempt to play catch up.

It’s been nice to see Mythic Delirium’s dark horse entry in the “hopepunk” genre catch on so beautifully. The responses have been not just laudatory, but stunningly eloquent.

By the way, in the interval, Cooney’s first major international publisher-released novel, Saint Death’s Daughter, appeared in bookstores physical and virtual. You need to check Dark Breakers out for sure, but you ought to check this other book too, really you should.

Now then, to the reviews!

In Locus

There have now been two reviews in Locus Magazine, the industry journal for speculative fiction.

• In his last review as a short fiction columnist for Locus, published in February, Rich Horton gave Dark Breakers a look, and focused especially on the original novella “Salissay’s Laundries,” which he dubbed “lovely, extravagant, colorful, passionate – like all of Cooney’s work.” He also included “Salissay’s Laundries” on his monthly Recommended Reading list.

You can read that review here.

• And then in the March issue, columnist Ian Mond reviewed Dark Breakers in its entirety, and in the course of a review full of superlatives also tossed in some retroactive additional love for “The Twice-Drowned Saint,” Cooney’s short novel included in our anthology A Sinister Quartet.

As I found with ‘‘The Twice Drowned Saint’’, it didn’t take long for me to be hooked by Cooney’s world-building: her Gilded Age secondary world and the mythology of three nested realities – human, fairy and goblin – cleaved apart by a centuries-old war … there’s Cooney’s magical ability at imbuing her worlds and characters with a life that goes beyond the page – a reminder that fiction is also a potent drug to us mortals.

Buy the whole issue to read the review — it doesn’t cost that much, there’s plenty more great stuff inside and Locus is absolutely worth supporting.

Among the Book Bloggers

• Out in book blogger land, this amazing review: Siavahda of Every Book a Doorway felt the need to invent words to explain how much she loved Dark Breakers, because ordinary language just didn’t cut it.

This book is jewel-tones and gilt and bells of bone. This book is secrets and yearning, terror and triumph, wonder and wildness. This book is a whisper and a song and a howl. … Dark Breakers is beautiful beyond the power of words to describe, but even more incredible is what it does to you. Lighting you up inside, snatching your breath away, holding you hypnotised because it’s a reminder, a promise, a proof you can hold in your hands that the world is so, so far from grey. That it’s worth getting up in the mornings, darlings; it’s worth it to keep carrying on, because we have art and magic and wonder and books like this!

Read the full review here.

• At Ancillary Review of Books, Jeremy Brett aka “SFF Librarian” shared a lovely review of his own that suggested a potential political appointment for the author:

There are few authors that merrily dance so close to the borders of Fairyland as C.S.E. Cooney. Should the mortal world ever establish diplomatic relations with the fae, Cooney, whose warm writing beautifully merges the otherworldliness and sheer strangeness of fairykind with the rich and familiar emotions of humanity, would make an excellent ambassador… for either side of the line.

Read the whole review here.

• Reviewer Anthony Cardno gave Dark Breakers a 5 out of 5 rating in his own review that examines the books characters and craft:

These stories beautifully illustrate the overlapping layers of creativity, love, ambition, and self-identity that propel us as individuals and thus as a society. … You do not have to have read Cooney’s novella Desdemona and the Deep to enjoy these stories, but if you have (or when you do), you’ll pick out the connections easily enough. They all stand alone very well, and all feature Cooney’s trademark love of language. If you’re like me, you’ll be so invested in the stories that you won’t notice the amazing craftwork, but it will hit you afterward how amazing is Cooney’s knack for the right descriptive word in each moment.

Read the rest of his review here.

• And neither last nor least, but the one we’ll happen to conclude with, from Kathryn Adams at Pixellated Geek:

Tasty as ice cream and as dizzying as an entire bottle of wine. … Cooney absolutely revels in her descriptions of a roomful of dancers in full costume, of gentry life, of high society, of the darkness in the cellar of a workhouse, of a quiet forest glade beside a cabin in the mountains. The gentry become drunk on human writing, human art, human mortality. Humans are dragged into the complicated politics of the gentry where rivals fight for the throne using sculptures and captive poets and venom. Cooney describes the paintings and mythology of this world in a way that you can almost touch and smell as well as see.

Read the full review here.

If you want to touch and see a signed copy of Dark Breakers, well, there’s a deal for that….