Books shelved under “Fantasy”

I won a copy of The Gauntlet in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

Farah Mirza is a gamer from a family of gamers. The Mirzas love all sorts of tabletop games, card games, and puzzles. On her twelfth birthday, she mistakenly receives the Gauntlet, a malevolent and self-aware board game. When her younger brother, Ahmad, gets trapped inside the game, Farah and her two friends have no choice but to enter the game themselves and…

There’s a clever tweet going around out there advocating for a moratorium on words like “throne” and “crown” in YA book titles, and I totally get why. A Crown of Wishes is one of those densely generic titles that does a terrible job at hinting about the contents of the book. In this particular case, it is at least appropriate, in that the book does feature both crowns (metaphorical and literal) and wishes (um ……

It has been over a year since I last reviewed a volume of Supernormal Step, the fantastic webcomic by Michael Lee Lunsford about Fiona, a girl with blue hair who has been sucked into a strange, parallel universe where magic is real and that’s really freaky. Fiona has long been on a search for a way home, and while she doesn’t get much closer in this one, she does learn more about the mysterious…

George R.R. Martin praised Best Served Cold as a “splatterpunk sword ’n sorcery” Count of Monte Cristo. I can kind of see why, but at the same time, The Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece and one of my all-time favourites, so that is a tough standard to live up to in my eyes.

Also, I feel like I need to slap a huge disclaimer on this review. Firstly, I haven’t read…

I often use the idea of stories that “grab” me, often elaborating on that by then saying they “don’t let go”. Sometimes, though, I should be talking about whether or not I was able to grab onto a story. Sometimes, as with The Star-Touched Queen, stories or parts of them elude me and leave me feeling dissatisfied, even if I’m not sure why.

Roshani Chokshi delivers an Indian mythology–infused story of a princess doomed…

Magical cities are one of my favourite tropes in fantasy novels. I think I could read nothing but magical city fiction for a while and take a long time to feel sated or bored; there is so much room for variation. Camorr from The Lies of Locke Lamora is an example that readily springs to mind, but this is a very old trope. As its title implies, City of Strife is very much a story…

This book has been on my to-read list for a while. So, like you do, when I saw the entire series on display in Chapters in paperback, I bought all of them despite having never read anything by Sarah J. Maas, secure in the knowledge that if I hated the first book, I could blame all of you, everyone on the Internet for leading me astray.

You are all safe.

This time.

Celaena Sardothien…

As with Truthwitch, Windwitch is a great palate cleanser after some less-than-inspiring reads. It has been a rough couple of weeks, reading-wise, and I’m trying to get back on top of my reading and reviewing game. So I grabbed this from near-the-top of the reading pile where it landed after buying it when it was published. Windwitch is not quite as exciting as the first book—it seems to lack a unifying, urgent central plot—and…

OK, I tried to write this review without spoilers, but I can’t. I have to talk about the fates of certain characters, because the more I think about it the angrier I get. Trigger warning for violence against women used as a plot device. Buckle up.

Do you want to live forever? I’m not talking to you, Starship Trooper. I’m talking to you, disposable poor person from 1878. Would you like to be a test…

So my review for the first book in this series begins, “It took me forever to read Servant of the Underworld, and I don’t know why. It’s great.”

That was two years ago.

Yeah.

I’ve had Harbinger of the Storm all that time, thanks to my wonderful subscription to Angry Robot Books … I’ve just been very, very, very negligent in actually reading these books! And I don’t know why, because they are great! Aliette…

Second review: March 8, 2019

I picked up Trickster Drift when it came out, but I knew I wanted to re-read Son of a Trickster to refresh my memory before I started the sequel. I’m really glad I did. It has given more an extended visit to Jared’s world, and what an interesting world this is.

I really love this book, and re-reading it has only increased my appreciation for its depth and the skill…

Previously, on Kara’s reviews of THE SPI FILES…:

… the intimations of bigger and better story arcs continue here. Once again we have a direct reference to the face-shifting ghoul terrorizing Ian. (According to the Goodreads series list, the next book is The Ghoul Vendetta, so I’m guessing we’ll soon get some pay-off on that arc!) …

I was going to criticize the covers and complain about how they’re all different poses of

…

Truthwitch was an essential palate cleanser. I needed something light, something that is not necessarily a romp but that would not allow me to get bogged down. And that’s what this book is. Susan Dennard’s Witchlands remind me of L.E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Recluce saga and others of its ilk; by transitivity, they remind me of my younger days when I could curl up with a thick fantasy novel while it rains outside and just read…

I’m very glad that no one asked me what I was reading when I was reading Carry On, because at first I was not sure I could describe it succinctly. How do you quickly sum up a book that is a fictional story based on fanfiction written by a character in another fictional story, with the series inspiring the fanfiction itself fictional. That is, in Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Carry On is Cath’s epic…

If you have read any Samuel R. Delany, you know he is a complex dude, and even his simplest stories are complex in some way. Tales of Nevèrÿon is no exception. Largely branded sword-and-sorcery, it’s actually an attempt to deconstruct this subgenre and provide commentary on the relationship between capitalism and slavery. And, for bonus points, if you read closely enough you start to see patterns and echoes from some of his other work, including …

It always tickles me when people criticize progressive portrayals of social justice in historical settings as being “unrealistic” even when those books have magic in them. Leaving aside the fact that there have always been radicals in every era, if you can stomach sorcerers and fae in your story, you should be able to accept that some men in Georgian England might want women to be educated.

I’ve had an ebook of Sorcerer to the…

I’m not sure I should have read this book this week, the week of that infamous election, of all weeks. All the Birds in the Sky is somewhat apocalyptic, and this week feels much the same. Although this book is entertaining, I can’t say it gave me much in the way of hope that humanity might find a way to pull itself together, either through science or magic or some combination of both. This was…

In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie combines the literary traditions from A Thousand and One Nights with aspects of Arabic mythology and a dash of our own fascination with apocalypses of the modern age. It is an entertaining novel in its own right, but I can’t help but feel like Rushdie has gone and pulled a John Irving on me and written something on repeat. All the old standbys are…

Maybe it’s just because I picked this up after a long day of failing to strip wallpaper from my bathroom, but White Cat was really gripping. Aside from a Supernatural-infused dinner break with my dad, I didn’t put it down and ripped through it in a single night. That’s not a feat—it’s YA and not particularly long—but it’s a mark of how much Holly Black made me want to stay in her world and…

I can’t tell if this is a compliment or criticism, so I’ll just put it out here and let you decide: I spent most of this book trying to cast different actors from Game of Thrones to play the characters in this book. The similarities are just so glaring—not that I’m saying The Adamantine Palace is in any way derivative of A Song of Ice and Fire. Its world and plot and characters are…