Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.
Middle grade contemporary fantasy. A young girl who lives with her grandparents above their bookshop in London, England, discovers that certain people, she among them, can literally enter books, have conversations with characters, and directly observe or even participate in the stories therein. Through the story, she and the reader learn more about the hidden …
Fantasy. I picked this one up because the author makes bookish content online that I quite like – her taste in books isn’t the same as mine, but it’s related, and she’s smart and politically interesting so I enjoy her videos. The book is a vaguely-medieval-Europe, dragons-and-castles-and-magic sort of fantasy that I don’t read a …
YA contemporary fantasy. A young Black woman in Brooklyn whose touch, and sometimes mere presence, causes plants to grow, bloom, move. From a hitherto unknown relative, she inherits an old mansion outside a small town in upstate New York. Adventure ensues and she learns more about her powers and the heritage she has been born …
Fantasy novella. The premise is that when enslaved people who were pregnant were thrown or jumped overboard from slave ships and subsequently died, their foetuses did not die but came into the world transformed into beings of the sea. Over the years, some of these “wajinru” survived, found each other, and built a society. In …
Fantasy. Set in Cairo in 1912. A bit steampunk, a bit noir mystery, and lots of magic drawn from folk traditions of Egyptian and other Islamic cultures. The premise is that in the late 19th century, djinn and other magical beings returned openly to the world in a way that was centred on Cairo. This …
Weird fantasy. The best thing that I can say about this book is that I’ve never read anything like it before. Unfortunately, when I was about a hundred pages in, I was on the verge of abandoning it. I’m glad I stuck with it, because it grew on me somewhat, but it never managed to …
Listed by some as young adult…but it doesn’t really read like it, for all that it’s about teens coming of age. Listed by others as historical fiction…but I refuse the idea that a book set when I would’ve been in Grade 10 belongs in such a category. Fantastical, certainly, and of a witchy bent, but …
Novella. Noir detective story mixed with eldritch horror. The book opens with a young boy trying to hire a PI who is more than he seems to kill his (the boy’s) stepdad. A very quick read. The kind of punchy, compelling writing you would want from both of its source genres and that you would …
Wuxia fantasy. Novella. Found family. A devoted nun of the order named in the book’s title, who is (for reasons revealed later) waiting tables in a village cafe, falls in with a gang of bandits, in the context of a country quietly seething in the grip of rebellion and civil war. Really, really good. Despite …