Books shelved under “Fantasy”

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…

“After centuries of calm, the Nameless One is stirring.” So opens the cover copy for Shadow Prowler.

A Nameless One, you say? Could this possibly be some kind of “evil overlord” (TVTropes) who wants to bend an entire land to his will? But surely there will be some resistance!

“Unless Shadow Harold, master thief, can find some way to stop them.”

A master thief named “Shadow Harold”, you say? Could he possibly be…

Oh my god give me more of these books right damn now.

I don’t normally do this, but can we just stop for a moment and look at this utterly gorgeous cover by Mike Heath? I was going to read Steeplejack from the description alone, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the cover that caught my eye while I was browsing the New Books shelf. Everything about this cover is amazing. The…

I had to dive into the children’s section of my library to get this one. I haven’t been in there for ages. There were short people around! And all the shelves are much shorter! Still, it was worth it. The Story of Cirrus Flux is an interesting attempt to set a children’s adventure novel in Georgian Britain. Matthew Skelton’s breadth of imagination makes for some entertaining characters and rambunctious action scenes. Nevertheless, the plotting is…

This is one of those rare instances where I feel a book’s cover copy gives away too much about the plot. Other than that, Mogworld is a lot of fun if you’re a fan of MMOs, or D&D-style fantasy adventure games, or spoofs of the fantasy genre in general. Yahtzee Croshaw brings his renowned wit to the world of novels, and while I miss the crudely-drawn stick-like figures against a yellow background, there’s plenty of…

Oh, I liked Graceling, but I want to like it a whole lot more. I want to like … perform surgery on this book to remove a bunch of stuff and graft new limbs to it in a kind of Frankensteiny horror show way and then it would be so much better. Kristin Cashore has an interesting idea here and provides all the requisite basics, but she never quite takes the story or the…

This is a book that shouldn’t work, but it does. Magical duels. Revenge plots. Hidden identities. Predictable twists. And a love triangle to boot. None of this is new, some of it is often boring. So why did I enjoy The Crown’s Game so damn much?

Well, to start, there is no shortage of magic in this book. Don’t get me wrong: I like books that don’t have much magic too. Every once in a…

I am slowly but surely running out of ways to review anthologies. It’s maddening, let me tell you. #firstworldproblems

What can I say about Trigger Warning? It’s another anthology. It’s another Neil Gaiman anthology. Much like Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things, Trigger Warning has its moments, its trademark Gaimanesque departures into clever flights of fantasy—but it’s just not the form for me. Gaiman waxes poetic about short stories in his introduction; it…

I signed up for NetGalley last week (as of the time I’m writing this review). I’ve been aware of NetGalley for a while but never gave it much thought because I have enough books to read as it is. Lately, though, I’ve been getting excited about more and more new releases and thought this was a good opportunity to try to snag ARCs for some of them before they come out. In this case, Conjuror…

You don’t see enough hollow world fiction these days. There is probably a reason for that. Fortunately there are no mole people to be seen here, although there are some merpeople. Emilie and the Hollow World mixes up a couple of genres and devices to create a satisfying adventure story with a likeable protagonist. My chief criticism is simply that Martha Wells doesn’t take it far enough. This is a “safe” book.

Emilie is supposed…

Back when this came I know there was a lot of hullabaloo about whether or not it was fantasy, and whether or not Kazuo Ishiguro wanted it to be seen as fantasy or liked fantasy or whatever. It’s true that Ishiguro, much like Margaret Atwood, has a certain literary cachet that allows his books to escape genre ghettoing—Never Let Me Go is science fiction like it or not, not that I’m going to spoil…

I couldn’t stay away from the sequel to The Wrath & the Dawn, and my library was quick to enable me with The Rose & the Dagger. The love story of Shahrzad and Khalid and the war it has provoked come to a swift conclusion here. Hold on to your bookmarks, folks, because Renée Ahdieh is not slowing down this magic carpet ride, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

First off:…

I have great respect for writers who can create entirely different worlds without succumbing to the need to explain every little detail of the world’s workings. Felix Gilman accomplishes this with The Half-Made World. His world is nothing like our own. There is the barest patina of the Wild West to it in the set dressings and costumes: frontier towns, guns and lawmakers, the looming spectre of industrialization, and disillusioned soldiers from a forlorn…

Occasionally I link to other reviews when I think they make a salient point that complements or contrasts nicely with mine. In this case I’m going to link to Khanh’s review of this book, because it is simply one of the best reviews ever. I laughed out loud reading this, and I liked it better than the book. That is my review of the review.

On to reviewing The Kiss of Deception,…

Hmm. A little too Stephen King for me. But that’s kind of a compliment.

I liked the various shorter works Thomas Olde Heuvelt has had nominated for Hugo Awards, so when I saw this on my library’s New Books shelf, it was a no-brainer. HEX looked like just the right amount of creepy and fantastic: I liked the idea of a social media–influenced modern take on a cursed town. As the narrative develops and the…