While it’s not necessary to read This Raging Light to be drawn into But Then I Came Back, this book is a close companion to Estelle Laure’s debut, although very different in tone. If you’ve read it, you already know what the prologue tells you—that Eden Jones, the cool girl in a cool leather jacket, …

I’m trying to imagine being the agent getting this pitch: “A teenage girl who lives in futuristic Versailles wants to escape this corporation-run Baroque world, but has to sell drugs to do it.” Is there any way you don’t pounce on that? I mean, they’re correctly billing it as “Breaking Bad via Marie-Antoinette.” Designer drugs! …

Miss Anna Arden is Barren. And how does an unmarried teenager in Victorian England know such a thing? Well, she’s not barren in the reproductive sense. This is much worse. In the world of Blood Rose Rebellion, Barren women can’t do magic, which is the only proof of a noble’s heritage and worthiness. Only those …

I read the first chapter of A Crown of Wishes and immediately had to check twitter. Sure enough, Roshani Chokshi and Stephanie Garber, author of Caraval, follow each other. Did they also edit each others’ introductory chapters? Because both begin with a mysterious invitation to a mysterious game run by a dangerous and magical individual. …

I was astonished when I picked up The Song Rising by Samantha Shannon, the third installment in the Bone Season septet. It’s only 350 pages, shorter than both previous volumes by more than a hundred pages. Most series this long (I believe this one is planned for seven volumes, a la GRRM) succumb to bloat …

This is a book about fear. This is a book about what fear makes. Mostly it makes monsters, and then it makes walls to keep those monsters out, and then–surprise, surprise–it makes more monsters inside those walls. And then the fearful call for blood, because cowardice and ignorance together are a powerful void, and they …

The Signalman is waiting. The cultists are waiting. Time divides them, and a short, terrible burst of violence, but that’s not very much, in the scheme of this universe. They all want to know what happened–what is happening–in the desert, but only the Signalman knows enough to be afraid. Something the cultists will only learn …

Scarlett and her sister Tella live on a conquered and colonized isle under the iron fist of its governor, their father Marcello Dragna. The governor is a brutal man, but Scarlett has a glimmer of hope. She—and by extension her sister—will soon escape, thanks to a marriage her father has arranged for her. And yes, …

Last year about this time there was a spate of Old West fantasy up for grabs, and this year we get the sequels. Cold Eye is the second in the Devil’s West trilogy, which features a version of the West untouched by white imperial expansion. Instead, there’s the Devil, a mysterious figure who sits like …

(I make no apologies for the alliteration, and neither does Seanan McGuire.) You would have to try pretty hard to not enjoy a Seanan McGuire novel. She’s just such a good writer, so assured that the story just flows and flows. So too does the mythology, a world of witches who have affinities for many …