I first read Kushiel’s Dart when I was too young for it, which was, in fact, the perfect age. I must have been about 14 when I picked the thick paperback from the shelf at my local Barnes and Noble. Most paperbacks were thick back then—there’s since been a shift to softcover—but this one was …
Every time I start a Jenn Lyons book I’m immediately overwhelmed and intrigued, and every time I finish a Jenn Lyons book I’m overwhelmed and desperate for more. It’s a very particular delight that comes with books so long and dense that the multiple glossaries and references at the end are not so much a …
When you deal with bad people, sometimes there are no good choices. And if you keep dealing with them, well, you might just find it’s no longer about bad choices, but the choice to be bad. To be monstrous. Monstrousness has always been the heart of this trilogy, and the question of what makes a …
In a reading rut? Wondering what to do with yourself as the heat fluctuates wildly and the pandemic presses on (in America, at least)? Here are eight very different books for this eighth month of this endless year. I enjoyed all of them, and I hope you’ll enjoy at least one, too. 1. The Wizard’s …
Kushiel’s Dart was published almost twenty years ago. In the decades since its release it has become a classic, spawning two sequels and half a dozen other books set in the world of Terre d’Ange. Full of the sinister, the sensual, the political, and the personal, Kushiel’s Dart centers on the remarkable story of Phèdre …
The Merciful Crow was one of my favorite debuts—favorite books, period—of 2019, and I’m overjoyed to find that the conclusion of Fie’s saga, The Faithless Hawk, is as original, emotional, dramatic, and insightful as her introduction. Fie has, against all odds, gotten Prince Jasimir and his bodyguard Tavin to safety. They are protected by an …
“So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.” As first lines go, Stephen Graham Jones’s opener for Night of the Mannequins is pretty close to …
Rejoice! For the necromancers are back, and they are gayer than ever. Pansexual, polyamorous lusts and even a few chaste passions simmer beneath more layers of mystery and necromantic magic than ever before, and dear grim little Harrow is our guide. Which is both fortunate and challenging, because she’s going places you wouldn’t believe. No …
Emily Tesh has done it again. She’s taken old and frankly overused staples of the Western/English canon and imbued them with new vigor and fresh surprises. Fairies? Vampires? Why not both together, each in a new and mutually illuminating way? It’s madness, and it works. It works magnificently. Drowned Country is even more of a …
The heroine of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Noemí, is a modern woman, as eager to drive her shiny new convertible to a party as she is to enroll in a Master’s program in anthropology. Her interests are broad, her charm indefatigable. She enjoys her glamorous life to the full, which is why she’s initially put …