Books shelved under “Fantasy”

What’s better than a book about vampires? How about a book about a book series about vampires—that might turn out to be real? Kate Stayman-London combines fanfic with spicy vampire sex and no small amount of peril in Fang Fiction. I received an eARC via NetGalley thanks to being a host of Prophecy Girls podcast.

Tess drops out of grad school after someone else in her program sexually assaults her. She takes solace in…

This book has fucked me up in subtle ways I might spend months if not years untangling. C.L. Clark has written a kind of book I have always wanted to write, a fantasy novel speaking to the present day even as its secondary world setting remains a colonial, nineteenth-century one. With unlikeable protagonists and unenviable no-win scenarios, The Unbroken is a deliberate hot mess. I didn’t love it. I didn’t even want to like it.

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A while back I had the opportunity to read The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and was thrilled to discover she had more titles to her name. We are truly living in a renaissance of high fantasy, and in particular, there is something special happening with the main character energy. Empire of Sand is no exception.

Mehr is the illegitimate daughter of an Ambhan governor. She has done her best to remember what her mother…

Hot on the heels of my ecstatic review of Renegades, I bring you the sequel! Which I didn’t realize was the second in a trilogy (I thought it was a duology for some reason), but it shows. Archenemies is peak middle book syndrome. Aside from that, however, it’s basically what it says on the tin, and I’m not mad about it. Marissa Meyer continues to unspool this story of superpowered prodigies, divided loyalties,…

Last year I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Daughter of the Moon Goddess, Sue Lynn Tan’s reimagining of the mythology of Chang’e (and specifically, her daughter). I was apprehensive whether Tan would bottle moonlight twice with Heart of the Sun Warrior—yet here we are, another five-star read. What can I say? Tan’s storytelling abilities are impressive.

Some time has passed since the end of the first book. Xingyin is living fairly…

Marissa Meyer is one of those authors always adjacent to my radar, never quite on it. I want to say I tried Cinder once and bounced off it, but I can’t actually say for sure. In any event, I noticed the sequel to Renegades on a shelf at my library and promptly checked out both books. I am a sucker for superhero remixes, and this one looked good. However, I have been burned by them…

What would you do if you could make the world a better place and save the soul of someone you’re attracted to, but you would have to die in his place? A hero would jump at this chance, of course. The Last Huntress is a story about willingness to sacrifice and standing against powers far beyond our comprehension. Lenore Borja’s world is creative and intriguing, though I can’t say the same for the story she…

What’s worse than not having a place in the world? Finding your place only to feel like it might be ripped away from you. Claudie Arseneault dangles this prospect in front of readers with Flooded Secrets, the second book in her Chronicles of Nerezia series of novellas. I was impressed by Awakenings because it felt so cozy. This book builds on that success while also revealing the first layer of even more potent themes…

The Poppy War left me more, and fortunately my library was able to deliver (well, I went and picked it up, but you know what I mean). The Dragon Republic is the continuation of R.F. Kuang’s fantasy reimagining of twentieth-century Chinese history, mixed in with meditations on magic, gods, and monsters.

Spoilers for the first book but not for this one.

Rin is now the effective commander of the Cike following her genocidal actions at…

I was so hyped for The Undetectables for no particular reason. It just seemed like a neat premise, and who doesn’t like the tagline, “Be gay. Solve crimes. Take naps”? Courtney Smyth promises a queernorm paranormal mystery involving witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and fairies. For the most part, she delivers, although the mystery part of the novel is perhaps the least satisfying.

Mallory and her two best friends, Cornelia and Diana, ran the eponymous onetime…

Another “New Books” shelf find at the library. I’d heard of Kiersten White as an author of Buffy tie-in novels (though I had never read any). The description of this book was interesting enough for me to try it. Just under three hundred pages, its pacing is quick enough I finished it in a single day. Mister Magic is a great example of a serviceable urban fantasy thriller that doesn’t wow yet still entertains. That…

Another satisfying conclusion to a fantasy trilogy? What have I done to deserve this? Freya Marske joins a small yet hallowed group of authors for wrapping her fantasy series with aplomb. A Power Unbound brings together the threads from the previous two books, resolving the story of the Last Contract and the more personal stories of the characters Marske has breathed into life over two novels. I was so excited to read this, and it…

Although I have never dealt with loss of this magnitude, I understand how it can reshape someone. Bad Cree is a story about the shape of loss, the way grief carves itself into your soul even when you think you haven’t let it. Jessica Johns uses traditional Cree stories to explore the power of family, of trusting yourself, and confronting those parts of yourself that you would prefer not to look at. It’s a “horror”…

Sometimes love is not forever. Sometimes relationships end. Sometimes you transform your lover into an unholy monster bent on world domination. That’s the gist of The Sins on Their Bones, by Laura R. Samotin. Heavy on tragedy and pathos, this is a book steeped in magic and mysticism yet not always satisfying in terms of pacing or plot. I received a copy in exchange for a review.

Dimitri Alexeyev used to be the Tzar…

There’s a now-classic sketch from comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb called “Are We the Baddies?”. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it, but to spoil the bit, it’s about two SS officers having a conversation on the front line in which it gradually dawns on them that they might be the bad guys in this war. Involving Nazis in your comedy is always a dicey proposition, but Mitchell and Webb pull…

Here we are! The story that began in In Every Generation and continued in One Girl in All the World concludes here with Against the Darkness. Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book from Kendare Blake, who will also return as a guest on my Buffy rewatch podcast, Prophecy Girls a couple of weeks after this review is published. I’d like to think I’m still providing a fair review of these books,…

The Poppy War might be the first novel by R.F. Kuang that I added to my to-read list, yet it has taken me this long to get to it. Oops. Shout-out to the colleague who lent me her copy. I’m excited that I was finally able to read this and see that, once again, the hype around a Kuang novel is justified. This is a war novel dressed up in fantasy clothes—and I’m not mad…

Sometimes you just want to find your place in the world. But what if that place proves to be a quest to help someone regain their memories? And that someone can also turn into a tree? Such is the dilemma of the protagonist of Awakenings, the first novella in a new series by Claudie Arseneault. I received a copy in exchange for a review.

Horace, described in the dramatis personae as an “embo extraordinaire,”…

How did I not know Martha Wells has written a bunch of fantasy novels? Who has been concealing this from me? Sure, Murderbot has been fun and all, but hello? I cut my teeth on high fantasy. Put this directly in my veins, please.

Was my reaction, when I picked up Witch King and realized that, while it is a standalone fantasy novel, it is far from Wells’s first.

Kai is a demon from…

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to read Erinsmore, a secondary-world fantasy novel coincidentally written by my former landlady from when I lived in England. Erinsmore works quite well as a standalone novel. However, in Mage Quest, Julia Blake provides us with an excellent sequel story, one that revisits beloved characters from the first book, introduces new ones, and builds further on the lore of this world.

On Earth, six years…