When we last saw Vasya in The Bear and the Nightingale, she had just survived the onslaught of the Bear, who wanted to bring unending death and night to Rus. Vasya’s witchy powers, combined with the might of the god of the snows, Morozko, saved Rus but doomed her father and stepmother, and now Vasya …

Here are six books to bring with you into the holiday season, whether you need something to make you laugh, to help you escape for a bit, to make you feel epic, or to satisfy your desire for revenge now that your brother has once again stolen the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers to bring …

There’s a trend in SFF and YA publishing that has begun to grate on me, and I share it with you now so that you can share in my irritation. For lack of a better term I’m calling it the X of Y and Z, and it is everywhere. I draw attention to it not …

Girls Made of Snow and Glass (Melissa Bashardoust) – The writing is elegant, as are Bashardoust’s interpretations of the elements we all know so well, mirrors and apples and snow. Mina, the “evil queen,” has power over glass, which I found especially clever, and Lynet, the “snow white” has power over snow. The magic is …

The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang are a matched pair of stories, and I figured that whichever I read first would change the way I read whichever I read second. So I did what any good D&D player would do and rolled a die. Even red, odd …

Spellbook of the Lost and Found – Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s debut, The Accident Season, was a quiet roar of a book that used suspenseful magic to get at some extremely heavy issues, and her second book is no different, except that it’s even better. It follows three groups of teenagers who collide after a party where …

How do you top Nevernight, a book that’s basically Harry Potter for assassins, complete with magical, stairway-shifting school accessible only by diving through something that really shouldn’t be dived though? Well, actually the second installment does involve a diary and a giant snake, but that’s where the similarities end. Mia Corvere murders people to further her …

Assassins are popular these days. His Fair Assassin trilogy, which I thought was going to be stupid but which was a dazzlingly well-researched historical and religious drama, and Godsgrave, which was a crazy-cool assassin rock concert at full blast. Hit is about corporate assassins, and Throne of Glass is a competition for the best assassin. …

There’s a quote from Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” that I particularly like: “The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.” This is, of course, a riff on Isaiah’s oft-misquoted poetry about—not the lion and the lamb—but …

We’ve survived half a year beyond 2016! What an accomplishment, and what better way to celebrate than to look yet further forward. Deliberately without an order of preference and in order of release, here are my most anticipated titles of the coming six months. Wicked Like a Wildfire – Since magic is so often utilitarian …