Imagine you’ve lived in the same house for the past 20 years. You know where the creaky floorboard is and how to pull that door just right so it closes properly. You know every room intimately, and you have treasured memories in each from different stages of your life. Now imagine one day in this …
Mild spoiler warning: if you’re worried about spoilers for the first book, I recommend both books and I recommend reading them in order! If you’re not worried about mild spoilers for the first book, read on. – Usually, I can give some sense of the story’s shape by naming a genre or two, some simple …
When gods go to war, it is no small thing. The Shadows of Gods by John Gwynne is a Scandanavian-inspired grim and dark book that nevertheless avoids the common pitfalls that come with the label of grimdark fantasy. It is not grim for grim’s sake, as in, it is not without hope and light moments. …
The series, A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, since its first book The Ruin of Kings, released in 2019, has quickly become the series I look forward to the most. The fourth book, The House of Always, is no exception. It continues to balance the world-building, plot, and character development of the characters and …
The WyldBoyZ aren’t your average boyband. Sure, they have “the smart one,” “the cute one,” “the shy one” and so on, but “the smart one” really does have an elephant’s memory, and “the cute one” really is kittenish. That’s because the boyz are genetic hybrids, each with the features of a specific animal: Matt the …
You might have known one. You might have been one. Or you might only have heard about them as yet another mythic creature on the internet: the girls (and boys, and nonbinary folks) who were obsessed with all things equine. Highly imaginative and yet necessarily down to earth, these special individuals might have been a …
Sometimes a book is so good that you go look up whatever else the author has written and devour that, too. And then sometimes a book is so very, very good that when you learn the book is a debut, you nonetheless go find the press that published such an audacious novel and start planning …
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey made me really consider that term: “the other woman.” Other. College English classes asked me to consider: who is the Other? And they made it a verb: to Other, to render something that could be taken in terms of its similarities and instead treating it only in terms of …
Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson is a novella set between Oathbringer, the third book of The Stormlight Archive, and the fourth, Rhythm of War. If you have not read Oathbringer, there will be spoilers for the previous books. You could read this on its own if you’re the type of intuitive reader to use context clues …
American stories about people with powers often involve organizations and the general public getting swept up in their struggles. The government wants to use them! Scientists want to study them! The media will hound them! Those stories are always a bit fatiguing to me in their paranoia (not unjustified paranoia, but still), because in reality, …