Fantastical absurdity and wry amusement at human (and nonhuman) foolishness. I read a scant handful of books from Pratchett’s famous Discworld series when I was a teen and enjoyed them, but they didn’t captivate me sufficiently for me to go out of my way to find more of them at the time. But recently, on …
Fantasy novella. A world reminiscent of imperial China. A cleric from a monastic order devoted to preserving history arrives, along with their talking bird-like companion with perfect recall, at what had been the late empress’ home while she was in internal exile many years before. They encounter an old woman who, as they catalogue the …
Middle-grade fantasy. Book three of the Nevermoor series. Features Morrigan Crow, a serious and sensible girl growing up in an absurd and fantastical realm, along with lots of strange creatures and magic and terrible villains and hijinks. As I’ve observed before, it is enough like that famous series by She Who Must Not Be Named …
Science fiction and fantasy, all at once. As a cover blurb from a prominent genre author puts it, “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” Which on the one hand neatly captures some of the book’s key elements, but on the other hand doesn’t really capture its essence. I of course went into …
Hardboiled detective fiction meets secret wizarding school fiction. A hard-drinking, mediocre, non-magical PI gets hired to solve a murder at the school for teens who can do magic where her estranged and very much magical twin sister is on staff. The mystery is pretty good, but I think the book is really more about the …
Second and latest book in what promises to be a lengthy series. In my review of book one, I desribed it as “sufficiently akin to *Harry Potter* in premise and story to bear the comparison, but not so similar that you feel like you’ve read it before,” and that assessment holds in book two. It’s …
Silkpunk. Short. A land of elemental magic, twin children born to a cruel empress and given to a monastery, and an uprising in which the intertwining of magic and new technologies is becoming ever more destructive. Really like the world building, and the writing is effective, but the story felt like it wasn’t enough. On …
Mediocre fantasy, but make it queer. Princess from one kingdom makes the long journey to marry her childhood betrothed in another, to form an alliance and to bring her people’s magic to this land that is increasingly plagued by dragons. He dies before she gets there, and in this non-heterosexist world it is perfectly normal …
First fantasy novel by Ann Leckie, who made her name as an original voice in the sci-fi world with the excellent *Ancillary Justice* trilogy (of which I still haven’t read the final entry). As you might expect from Leckie, this is not typical fantasy. There are humans at a relatively early stage of state formation …
Sequel to Son of a Trickster. Jared’s coming-of-age journey continues, now in Vancouver and with a focus on holding tight to his sobriety while doing his best to refuse the supernatural side of the world that he stumbled into at the end of the first book. As with book one, the writing was great and …