Books shelved under “Fantasy”

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…

Mask of Shadows was just some random fantasy novel I requested on NetGalley in exchange for a review, and then I started hearing all about it elsewhere. Linsey Miller’s debut novel features a genderfluid protagonist trying to become the next assassin to the queen. Sal is a thief and one of the few survivors of a massacre that wiped out almost all of their countrypeople. They view the assassin position as a chance to align…

(To be read in Majel Barrett’s voice.)

Previously, on Kara’s reviews:

—Celaena intrigues me as a character. I’m not sure I like her that much…. I very much respect an author who can create an unlikable protagonist and make me enjoy their journey and their story, and that is the case here. I didn’t necessarily like Celaena as a person, but I cared what happened to her.—

—I also liked the positive female friendship

…

A Fierce and Subtle Poison is based on, or at least owes some inspiration to, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, a work of science fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a scientist’s daughter who becomes immune to poisonous plants but poisonous herself to others. Samantha Mabry transposes the setting to present-day Puerto Rico and ages down the cast a little; Lucas becomes a high school senior on the verge of college studies, spending one more summer in Puerto…

Infernal Devices is the story of George, an unremarkable man with no major talents who has inherited his father’s watchmaker shop. Various zany characters show up and drag him into an intricate conspiracy reminiscent of H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and mostly, in my mind, Jules Verne. K.W. Jeter propels George through increasingly dangerous, nonsensical, over-the-top adventures powered by steampunk, bravado, and sheer imagination. This is an adventure in the classical sense, and as a work…

Welcome back to the alternative Scranton, where the supernatural is out in the open, and Stan Markowski and his partner, the undead Karl Renfer, have to investigate supernatural crimes. Evil Dark is the second entry in Justin Gustainis’ Occult Investigations series. Stan, Karl, Christine, et al continue to process the aftermath of the first book. Then two FBI agents rock up to town, looking for some help tracking down the creators of supernatural snuff films.…

Treasure & Treason is the first major book in the Raine Benares series that isn’t from Raine’s point of view. Instead, Tamnais Nathrach, her formerly-dark-mage goblin ally, is the protagonist. Tam is organizing an expedition to the continent of Aquas. He hopes to beat the Khrynsani, who are working with Sarad Nukpana’s mother and evil alien invaders, to finding the Heart of Nidaar. It’s another magic rock, this one with Earth Magic instead of Soul…

Oh let me count the ways I love Ursula K. Le Guin. I have many favourite authors, but her writing has a special place in my heart, and her storytelling also. The Earthsea cycle is such a rich canon of literature, and just thinking about the ways in which Le Guin explores humanity in these books makes my head spin. Tehanu perfectly demonstrates Le Guin’s ability to achieve this exploration through understatement. This is a…

I get a strong Charles de Lint vibe from Mark Tompkins’ The Last Days of Magic, at least as a result of the frame story. Tompkins reaches back into the less mainstream myths and legends of Europe to answer the question that often comes up in fantasy: why, if there was so much overt magic centuries ago, does our world seem so barren of it now? Some authors say it’s hiding in plain sight,…

My library did not have a copy of this, because it has been independently published, so I had to go and buy it like the fan I am. The Ghost Rebellion picks up shortly after The Diamond Conspiracy. Books and Braun are back, along with longtime supporting characters like Bruce Campbell, and some new faces in the principal setting of India. The Ministry managed to foil a plot against the British Empire while technically…

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…