Books shelved under “Fantasy”

This could be the poster-child for a book that needs more editing. Spellwright is equal parts complex yet confounding, intriguing yet boring. It simultaneously stokes that fire for fantasy that first launched me into writing my own stories waaay back when I was a wee pre-teen, reminding me of those halcyon days of lying crosswise in an armchair, reading the Belgariad or chunky 600-page Recluce hardbacks, not a care in the world because there was…

So here I am, working my way through my honestly impressive backlog of ebooks from Angry Robot and Strange Chemistry. I have zero memory of Poltergeeks, the first book in this series from Sean Cummings, except maybe a vague impression that I liked it. Fortunately, Student Bodies makes it easy enough to dive into Julie Richardson’s life as a Shadowcull that I didn’t feel lost at all. Also, disclaimer: I read the first third…

Sisters Red is the best kind of fairytale retelling, in that Jackson Pearce takes the kernel of a fairytale (“Little Red Riding Hood” here, obvs) and then … just runs with it. There’s no need to hew too closely to the “original” story—because what is the original story, anyway? Instead we get this cool, thrilling urban fantasy adventure about sisters who slay werewolves … like, yeah. I’m down with that.

Scarlett and Rosie March are…

“Best of” collections can be fun, sometimes, because they might introduce you to authors you might not otherwise have encountered. I found Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition in a library sale and decided to give it a shot. Other Goodreads reviewers have already pointed this out, but I’ll echo them: rather disappointing to see Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe’s names on the cover but no stories from them in the collection. WTF?…

I’ve finally figured it out: this is a buddy cop story.

Wait wait wait wait wait—it makes total sense! Think about it. Laurence is the by-the-book, hardnosed detective who has been on the job for years when, one day, out of the blue, this smartass rookie with a talent for learning languages and blowing hot air waltzes into his life. The two become partners and start working cases together, and Temeraire keeps getting Laurence in…

Oddly enough I recall being worried I wouldn’t like this book as I started it. And, of course, having finished it, I don’t know whence that trepidation originated, because of course Laini Taylor has delivered another sound tapestry of rich, fantastical storytelling. Could not put down Strange the Dreamer and would have read it in a night if I had the time.

This lyrical title sounds like a play on word order or the opening…

To whoever finds this,

I say unto you now thrice, look, this isn’t really a novel.

Reader, I write this with the hope that, one day, we might be successful in undoing (redoing? doing? DOing?) what has already been undone. But if you are reading this and scratching your head, then perhaps all our efforts have come to naught.

I believe that a concerted time-travel project (or “diachronic operation”) has been carried out, in…

I don’t remember how The Devil You Know ended up on my to-read list, except maybe that a lot of people compare it to The Dresden Files, one of my favourite fantasy series of all time. Yet it’s worth noting that I like The Dresden Files in spite of its noir elements, and I like Harry Dresden in spite of the streak of casual chauvinism that runs through him. The Devil You Know is…

One last book review from 2017! I almost forgot I read this, because I read it into a microphone. I recorded a bespoke audiobook of Stardust as a Christmas gift for a friend who hasn’t had a lot of time to read and is trying to get back into it with audiobooks. I chose Stardust for its length and because it has an upbeat ending, which is something my friend expressed more interest in after…

The difficult relationship between power, responsibility, and humility is on full display in The Mistress of Spices, where Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s empathetic and passionate writing merges with magical realism. I loved a lot of the ideas in this book, and the meditative way in which CBD punctuates the narrative with beats on each spice. Yet the execution of the story itself, and the characters, left much to be desired.

Tilo is a young woman…

Who Fears Death reminds me a lot of Dhalgren, another seminal work of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction. Nnedi Okorafor explores the intersections of tradition, sex, and sexuality; of history and intertextuality. The narrative, while slightly more straightforward than Dhalgren, still challenges and requests a certain level of involvement. Although I didn’t enjoy this as much as I wanted to (and probably won’t watch its adaptation), I think I understand why it has captured the…

Probably a mistake to start this just as Desert Bus for Hope started; I should have known I wouldn’t get any reading done last week.

In any event, I couldn’t get into An Ember in the Ashes. I don’t think it’s a bad book, or even badly written (though I’m not sure its style is for me). I just didn’t connect with either of the protagonists, and the characterization is a little too clear-cut…

Would watch the movie, like, yesterday. You get on that, movie-producing people.

Shadowshaper is one of those books I loved from page one, and it only got better. Daniel José Older’s command of character, culture, and language results in a breathtaking contemporary urban fantasy. This book reminds me a lot of Charles de Lint’s work. The protagonist is thrust into a world she doesn’t quite understand, one built on myths and legends only half-shared or…

Sam Sykes drops us off very much in media res in Tome of the Undergates. Often I love that kind of thing—exposition is for chumps! But as with my experience with An Ember in the Ashes, perhaps trying to read this just after Desert Bus for Hope was a bad idea. Or perhaps it was having an antihero as a protagonist.

This reminds me a great deal of Best Served Cold. I…

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting takes on urban fantasy. I enjoy urban fantasy set in our world, where the supernatural are either covert or living openly, but there is something so good about made-up cities and their cultures. Radiant, Karina Sumner-Smith’s first book in a trilogy about the Towers, is a prime example of this. She creates a world where magic is as commonplace as technology is for us—but…

First of all, let’s be clear: Norse mythology is hella cool.

In his introduction to Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman echoes what draws me to it. Like him, I was entranced by the stories of the Norse gods from an early age. I remember vividly my elementary school library having this big, thick book on Norse mythology full of illustrations. When I went through my mythology phase, I tolerated the Greek gods and occasionally talked…

Yes, hello, hi, someone asked nicely on Twitter and got an eARC of City of Betrayal and that someone was me, but then I went and didn’t read it until near the publication date anyway because … busy … and not wanting to sit on my review, but also wanting to hype it up closer to publication. So, although this is an honest review, it most certainly is biased, because I liked City of…

After over a year, I stumbled across the last three Temeraire books while browsing Chapters and realized the time has come to pick up this series and put it to rest. Crucible of Gold, the seventh instalment in these adventures, sees Laurence and Temeraire reinstated in the Aerial Corps for an urgent mission to Brazil. Napoleon has a shaky alliance with the Tswana, and they are raiding the Portuguese colonies there for their enslaved…

A Criminal Magic hooked me from the start. A friend gave this to me for my birthday (apparently it was on my to-read list, not that I’d remember). I started it on Saturday, and 25 pages in I texted her to let her know she had picked well. Lee Kelly’s story of sorcerers labouring under a magic Prohibition in an alternative 1926 is just captivating. From parallel plot-lines to a careful, judicious use of magic,…

I didn’t really know what to expect from this; I just requested it from NetGalley and Curiosity Quills Press on a whim from its description.

Brooklyn, our first-person protagonist, is cool under fire—literally, for she is a firefighter. She discovers that, courtesy of her estranged father, she isn’t fully human. She’s half-human, half … something else. Something that the uninformed would term “demonic”. It explains a lot about Brooklyn, about her past and her present…