Nine heroes came together and defeated the dark lord of Necrad twenty-two years ago, losing one of their own in the process, and now have been doing their best without him trying to lead the city to mixed results. On the surface, The Sword Defiant is a story of one warrior realizing the good old …
Since the release of her novella Silver in the Wind in 2019, I’ve been a fan of Emily Tesh, so her debut novel, Some Desperate Glory, was high on my anticipation list for 2023. In this science fiction thriller, contact with aliens has happened, and it ends with the destruction of Earth. Now Valkyr is …
Fantasy has always had a gift for being malleable to incorporate other genres of fiction from horror, historical, mystery, folklore, fairy tale, humor, romance, suspense, and westerns, so why not slice of life? It has been a staple for anime for years and has become quite popular as a video game genre, so it’s about …
The days of The Lord Ruler and his Final Empire are long behind the Wax and Wayne gang and us as readers. Yet, the rippling effect of Brandon Sanderson’s original Mistborn trilogy echoes all the way to the final book in Mistborn’s second era, The Lost Metal. Before now, the series stood alone in the …
Who is Nona? That’s the question you may ask yourself repeatedly throughout Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, the third installment of The Locked Tomb series. Like the two books before it, you’ll be asking yourself many questions at first, but Nona the Ninth gives far more answers than before. Like you, Nona doesn’t know who …
A teenager discovers they have magic abilities and joins a group with the same abilities hoping to learn from them. Sound familiar? Yet, The Daughter of Redwinter by Ed McDonald is anything but that simple. It is a story with those elements, but so is it a tale of the class divide, finding a place …
Anthony Ryan has a gift. A gift for writing war and mysticism then entangling the two together so you cannot have one without the other. In the fantasy genre, war has become rather tiresome. Yet, whenever Ryan writes a new battle, he has me intrigued, glued to my book until the battle is won or …
We decide what is the way of the world. Us. People. – Uspa Whoever told the people of John Gwynne’s series The Bloodsworn Saga that the gods would stay fallen after the Guðfalla may have spoken too soon. The Hunger of the Gods, the follow-up to The Shadow of the Gods, picks up right where …
Whoever first uttered the phrase that it was about the journey, not the destination, never felt the heartbreak of having read a terrible ending to a series they loved. Luckily for all of us, reading Jenn Lyon’s A Chorus of Dragons, both the journey of the books so far and the final destination on the …
Before Fate of the Fallen by Kel Kade, it had been a while since both an inciting event and an ending took me by such a surprise. Though they were well done, making total sense within the story while being utterly shocking, one cannot lean on those types of moments without getting diminishing returns. Luckily, …