Three years ago I picked up Treasure & Treason, the first half of what should have been one spin-off novel from Lisa Shearin’s Raine Benares series. Finally, I got around to reading Ruins & Revenge, the sequel/conclusion. I find that most of my review from Treasure & Treason stands for this book (not surprising, given that they should have been one book!). Despite long singing the praises of Shearin and her fantasy series,…

Much like my situation nearly a year ago when I read The Rhesus Chart, I was in a bit of a reading slump when I decided to tackle The Annihilation Score. I’ve been in this slump for all of 2021, mostly because it is harder for me to get books (especially fiction) right now—consequently, my ratio of fiction to non-fiction is much lower than it used to be, and as much as I…

You all know how much I love me a good confidence story, as much as I love a good heist story. Throughout the years, fantasy has handed us many such wonderful stories and lovable rogues—some of which I have read, some of which I haven’t. The Mask of Mirrors will doubtless be compared to the most popular and celebrated of these, with merit and good reason. I’ll eschew such comparisons as de rigeur then, and…

Although Pet crossed my book radar a few times, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it hadn’t been recommended to me by my friend Emeline. The descriptions of the book, despite its promise of a trans main character, didn’t leave me with the impression that it would be my jam. Indeed, for the first third or so, that was my initial conclusion: that I could understand Pet’s appeal for other readers, but…

I am in the minority for this one judging by the rave reviews it is getting ahead of its release. Like many of those other reviewers, I received a copy of The Councillor from NetGalley and DAW in exchange for a review. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a short one: I did not finish this book.

We’re off to a great start. Lysande is an advisor/close friend to Queen Sarelin, who plucked her from an…

It pains me, because everyone is so hyped about Kameron Hurley, and I want to be hyped too. Alas, this first foray into her writing was not a successful venture. Despite spending exactly a week with this book, I am just barely halfway through. It was this realization that made me decide to cut my losses. I am not going to finish The Mirror Empire.

Principally, I just don’t care about any of the…

I am free! Over a year ago I embarked on re-reading the two trilogies that comprise The Wayfarer Redemption, and with Crusader I have achived this goal. Sara Douglass no longer has any hold over me! (So, after I finished this book, I discovered that of course Douglass couldn’t resist writing another sequel trilogy, featuring Axis and StarDrifter, along with characters from other novels. I could, therefore, keep going. But I will not, and…

Full disclosure: I was a Kickstarter backer for this book. I was very excited for Common Bonds, because I am aromantic, but that’s an identity that isn’t well-represented in mainstream media (and when it is, it’s usually conflated with/paired with asexuality—I am also asexual, but I like the split attraction model because it helps me discuss my experiences with nuance). A great deal of this review will be me talking about the importance of…

There were many reasons I added Elatsoe to my to-read list when it started making the rounds on Twitter: supernatural mystery, asexual protagonist (which I forgot until I started reading it), Indigenous author and protagonist, etc. It’s great when a novel has so many draws, isn’t just a single thing. Darcie Little Badger’s debut is one part ghost story, one part educational piece about stolen land and colonial ambitions—and all about a main character who…

Empire of Wild is a supernatural thriller that combines the legend of the rogarou with a woman’s search for her missing husband. But it would be a mistake not to recognize that this is also a story about colonialism, about European/settler ideologies clashing with Indigenous ideas of hearth, home, and connection to one’s community and the land. Just as The Marrow Thieves showcases how settlers can go to any length to extract and exploit resources…

This one took a while to start to work for me, and I’m not sure it really ever did. Vicious is one of those novels where I can tell that V.E. Schwab knows her stuff. That is, the writing here is quality; the plot is top-notch, the characterization is exemplary. Nevertheless, there is something about her style, something about the tenor or tone or theme of the book, that left me cold. And so…

New fantasy that tries to feel like classic sword-and-sorcery with a dash of epicness thrown in, Theft of Swords reads like a labour of love. It is an uneven combination of tropes any half-dedicated fantasy reader will recognize. However, Michael J. Sullivan turns those tropes into a decent, entertaining story that showcases some of the best parts of this genre, in my opinion. This is not the type of novel that blows off one’s socks,…

This was one of those books where I was afraid it would not live up to the hype, because people I follow on Twitter have not been able to stop talking about it. Fortunately, Cemetery Boys lived up to the hype—perhaps even exceeded it in some ways—and I went from being apprehensive about possibly not liking such a popular book to being really happy I took this chance. It’s great as a trans story, great…

This is a marked improvement over the first book in this trilogy, but that isn’t saying much. Pilgrim is very much Drago’s redemption story, and Sara Douglass is determined that we care for him as a person and a hero. And you know what? I think she might actually succeed. Not because Drago is all that great, but because our choice of other heroes is … not great. Axis and Azhure (well, to be…

You should read my review of Peace Talks before you read this review. Also, I don’t know how to talk about this book without spoilers. So if you want a spoiler-free review: Battle Ground is a flawed attempt to give fans of the Dresden Files the climax Butcher thinks they want, but it falls short. There are definitely crowning moments of awesome, low moments, and the thoughtful moments we have come to expect.

Spoilers from…

It feels like with fantasy these days I am eternally questing after the next fresh idea. Don’t get me wrong—there is sometimes nothing better than a classic, trope-laden fantasy from the late twentieth century to stir my book loins. But every time I pick up a big, heavy book like Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, I hope deep down in my heart that it will give me something new, that it will stir up not…

Rebecca Roanhorse bottled lightning once, and now she is back to do it again

Storm of Locusts picks up not too long after Trail of Lightning. Maggie agrees to help the Thirsty Boys apprehend the White Locust, a strange cult leader buying up explosives. The mission goes sideways in a big way, and Maggie picks up the pieces and finds herself responsible for a young woman, Ben, with some clan powers, a chip on…

This is a book by a Black man about slavery in the United States, and I wanted to open this review by boosting the thoughts of Black reviewers—after all, their take on this book is going to be more salient than the opinion of a white woman like me. Unforunately, as I browsed reviews of The Water Dancer on Goodreads, I was dismayed to see that the majority of them are from white people (mostly…

Time travel. Like Captain Janeway, I hate it. I mean, I love stories about it (hello, I watch Doctor Who every Sunday with one of my besties). But the kinds of paradoxes in The Future Falls are not exactly my cup of tea. If you can look past that, this is another fun fantasy novel that benefits from being mostly set in Calgary, and you don’t see enough of those! If you liked the first…

Delany remains one of the authors who most consistently fascinates, educates, and challenges me. His science fiction and fantasy novels are never exactly what they seem—or perhaps are exactly what they seem—and if Dhalgren is perhaps his most widely-known inscrutable work, his Return to Nevèryön series, and particularly Flight from Nevèryön, are the most obviously inscrutable.

I’m not sure how to summarize this book. I wanted to say that the first two tales are…

A podcast I listen to, Read It and Weep, has developed a metaphor for the films it’s watching during its current season. Movies that are mostly pleasant diversions are soda (or pop as I would call it); movies that require a lot more effort to understand and enjoy are coffee (some are in fact very strong coffee). Like all metaphors this one has its limits, yet my mind kept coming back to it…

One of the reasons Brandon Sanderson took off, I suspect, is that he manages to bring an urban fantasy feel to more high fantasy or epic fantasy settings. In Ashes of the Sun, Django Wexler accomplishes a similar feat. This is a book set in a world incredibly different from our own, a land reminiscent of the epic fantasy books that for a time dominated this genre, yet the pacing and style are much…

I’ve spent a great deal of time these past two years helping a friend revise her PhD. dissertation, which was about the history of sustainability in the Ontario forestry industry. Riveting, right? Anyway, one of the ideas she explores early in her thesis is that European settlers brought with them to the New World various prejudices regarding forests. The forest, in many European folkloric traditions, is a dark and scary place. We see this echoed…

Wait, was it November when I finished the first trilogy?? How is it June already? Wow. Anyway, as promised, I’m back with the first book of the second trilogy set in Sara Douglass’ Tencendor universe. Whereas I am certain I read the first trilogy as a teenager, I’m not sure if I ever read the entire second trilogy. So some of these books might be new to me? They all kind of blurred together. If…

I’m slowly working my way through my Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry backlog from back when I had a subscription to every book they published. Anna Kashina’s name was familiar: turns out I read a similarly named Shadowblade that also features cool sexy sword-wielding ladies. I’m not saying these books are clones, but yeah … Kashina has a theme here.

In Blades of the Old Empire, an ancient enemy has returned and has an outsized interest…

This is one of those books where you kind of like it but also kind of don’t like it, and you're low-key impressed you don’t actively hate it? Yeah, I think that's what this is. Stolen Songbird is a hot mess of paradox: the plot is straightforward but also convoluted; the romance is broken but also kind of believable; the main character is annoying but also grew on me. I liked it enough that I…

So here we are, over 2 years after I read Blood of Tyrants: the last Temeraire novel!

It’s times like these I always want to take a deep breath before I dive into writing this review.

Let’s get the verdict out of the way: League of Dragons is a good conclusion to the series, but it is not without its strange elisions. Naomi Novik proves up to the task of wrapping up her sprawling…

And so, dear reader of reviews, my journey into revisiting cheesy ’90s epic fantasy that I may or may not have read as a kid continues. Last year I dipped into The Far Kingdoms to keep myself company with a broken elbow. This year, with a pandemic stalking close, I decided it was time to return to that universe with The Warrior’s Tale. Allan Cole and Chris Burch place Rali Antero in the narrator…

What's better than a magical mystery? A magical mystery featuring baked goods, you say? Sign me up! Baker Thief is a conventions-busting, inclusive, fun alternate world urban fantasy novel with mysteries and thrills and no small amount of underdogs taking on the corrupt underbelly of corporations.

It is, in short, a good read.

Adèle is a detective recently relocated and transferred to a new unit. Shortly after moving in, a masked, purple-haired thief named Claire…

I originally received an eARC from NetGalley, but for reasons that escape me (probably my own incompetence) I forgot to download it. Out of a desire for completionism, I bought a copy of The Weaver so I could read and review it. Although the basic premise is sound and interesting, Heather Kindt’s writing style didn’t work for me. This attempt at a combination of thriller, romance, and fantasy lacks what I enjoy about those three…

Is this the year of me finally reading sequels closer to the previous book? First I read The Obelisk Gate, and now Master of the World hot on the heels of Worldshaper? Who even am I?

As usual, spoilers for the first book but not for this one.

Edward Willett picks up the story where he left off in the first book: Shawna Keys has abandoned the world that she Shaped to the…

As I’ve said before and will say again, one reason I love the library is for book discovery. I had zero idea what I was in for with Worldshaper. In this case, I saw book 2 on the New Books shelf, and fortuitously book 1 was also present in that very same library branch. So I borrowed both on a wing and a prayer, and here we are. Perfectly serviceable portal fantasy for some…

I was reading a very different, unrelated book last night before bed, in which someone says that the key to a good story is usually obsession. Laini Taylor has learned this storytelling lesson well, for her characters are distinguished by their obsessions. From Lazlo’s obsession with Weep or Thyon’s obsession with alchemy in Strange the Dreamer to Skathis’ obsession with power or a new antagonist’s obsession with revenge here in Muse of Nightmares,…

I did not enjoy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but N.K. Jemisin’s brilliant short story collection gave me hope that The Fifth Season might be her novel for me. Indeed it was! I can conclude that it wasn’t Jemisin’s style that bothered me about the previous series, just the world and the premise and the plot, etc.—it just wasn’t a story I was into. In contrast, The Fifth Season tells a very focused story about…

Last year I read The Rook, and I liked it enough that when I noticed this sequel at the library, I gave it a shot. Did not regret! This is a great example of a sequel that doesn’t disappoint—although, it doesn’t quite deliver exactly what I wanted either. Namely, I was expecting another book that follows Myfanwy Thomas. She’s here in Stiletto, but she isn’t really the central protagonist. For that we have…

I backed this on Kickstarter, but of course, then it sat on my shelf for a bit. Recently Gwen Benaway has been a prominent voice against Toronto Public Library allowing Meghan Murphy to host a talk at one of their branches. In following that news, I decided this was a good time to get to Maiden, Mother, Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes.

I really wish I could gush about this book and say I…

It’s time to finish off my re-read of the first trilogy of The Wayfarer Redemption with Starman, the conclusion of Axis’ battle against Gorgrael to fulfil a Prophecy and recreate the land of Tencendor. I seem to have stumbled into a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts situation here: I want to give this book two stars, but the series as a whole has actually been much more enjoyable than the individual books ever were.

Spoilers for this book…

It isn’t often that a book wins me over like The Throne of the Five Winds did! I usually know my general sentiment towards a book within the first fifty pages or so. My mood will change for better or worse as the story unfolds, and a 2-star book might make it to 3 or vice versa, and once in a while, a 4- or 5-star book plummets to 1 star because of an unforgivable…

Back for round 2 of my review of this classic ’90s fantasy series. In my review of The Wayfarer Redemption I was cheeky but also tried to be serious. I didn’t want to be too hard on Sara Douglass, because after all, the clichés in these books weren’t quite clichés when she was writing. At the same time, it’s hard to call these books great. They‘re good, for a certain entertainment value of…

Sara Douglass is one of those fantasy authors whose books I haphazardly read B.G. (before Goodreads), throughout my teens, as I encountered them in the stacks of my local library’s fantasy section. It was good times! As with my ur-fantasy experiences of David Eddings and L.E. Modesitt, Jr., these books almost certainly don’t hold up. Yet when I came across not 1, not 3, but all 6 books of this series at my local used…

I grabbed this book off my library’s new books shelf, and I’m glad I did. I’m happy to live in an era where we can have a blurb on the cover of a book that says, “#MeToo and #Resistance through the lens of epic fantasy.” Count me in! The Women’s War posits a world where men control the direction of women’s lives and a woman’s worth is largely determined by the children she has or…

It seems like every time I review a short story anthology I always start with a disclaimer about how short stories, and by extension, their anthologies, are not really “for me.” In this case I need to say it because How Long ’Til Black Future Month? is one of those rare exceptions where I … I actually liked pretty much every story in here. Not equally, of course. But there were only one or two…

This book is a hot mess. I don’t even really know where to start with it.

The Dark Net is a horror novel with the basic premise what if demons took over our computers? It’s a mediocre take on the idea that our dependence on networked devices, our proclivity for screen-time, leaves us vulnerable—in this case, to possession, psychic hacking I guess. They do say that the eyes are the windows into the soul, right?

…

First, huge shout-out to the Oxford comma lurking in this title. Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is an anthology of queer Indigenous science fiction and fantasy by Indigenous authors. That’s it, and yet it is so much more. I really liked Hope Nicholson’s comment in her foreword about how some stories aren’t meant to be told, or at least, do not need to be shared with just…

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the eARC!

Maren is seventeen years old and ready to strike out on her own. Well, not exactly on her own. She has a girlfriend, aka a heartmate, Kaia, who is the more adventurous of the pair. They are head-over-heels in love for one another—but when an elite group of Aurati, women who do dirty work for the repressive Emperor, show up and abduct Kaia for purposes…

This review will be shorter than usual because I broke my elbow and have one hand in a cast.

I read this because I remember reading a later book in the series, The Warrior Returns, featuring Amalric's sister, Rali, as the narrator. I don't think I ever read The Far Kingdoms itself, so I decided to go back and give it a try. I don't regret this, but it didn't do much for me…

This review will be shorter than usual because I broke my elbow and have one hand in a cast. For my future self looking back to see what I thought of this book: Janani's review is very detailed and concurs with much of my opinion. And, as ever, Julie's review eloquently explains my dissatisfaction with the romance.

Children of Blood and Bone is a Nigerian-inspired fantasy novel about two pairs of siblings wrapped up in…

Life is unfair. It’s even more unfair when you get tangled up with the justice system. One of the things that I’ve had to unlearn over my 29 years as a privileged white dude is my faith in the fairness and equity of the justice system. The Walls Around Us explores the cracks of the justice system from the perspective of youth, particularly young girls of colour. I was nearly tempted to give up on…

So you want to stage a soft-coup and manipulate the succession, but you have one problem: you need some kind of plausible heir. Fortunately for you, about 17 years ago you encountered a baby at the same time there was a royal massacre, and well, you know, one thing led to another, and you ended up stashing her with some super skilled warrior so she would grow up all big and strong. Also, you read…

At least one book’s length, if not a whole library of, encomia of Ursula K. Le Guin has already been written by people far more learned than me. It’s so tempting to take this collection of her novellas and use it as an excuse to praise Le Guin as an author in general. Yet there isn’t much I can hope to add to that conversation. Yet The Found and the Lost, as a collection…