The next few months have some promising releases, and I’ve compiled the best of them all in one place. Cruel Prince – January 2: Holly Black never disappoints with her combination of adventure, romance, and true darkness. I anticipate being impressed once again by her take on Faerie, a realm she imbues with deadly tricks …
During GenCon this year, I had the pleasure of speaking with Leonidas Vesperini, Mythic Games’ project manager, about the newest Kickstarter project; Time of Legends: Joan of Arc. Mythic Games has a great history of producing entertaining and wonderful games that have become a reality through Kickstarter, including last year’s massively successful Mythic Battles: Pantheon. These …
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 …
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 …
There was a spate of SFF Westerns a year or so ago, but now YA SFF has turned its attention to Russia. We already had the Grisha trilogy by Leigh Bardugo, but with Crooked Kingdom, The Crown’s Fate, and The Bear and the Nightingale there’s a definite trend. And now we have The Five Daughters …
Graham-Jones’s Mongrels was a sleeper hit for me from 2016, a story about a young man who’s a late-bloomer in his family of werewolves. Did it say anything new about that beaten-to-death subject, the werewolf? Not really. Did it say anything new about the people who are werewolves? Hell yes. It stripped away all the …
When I was younger, I always wanted a twin. Siblings were fine, but a twin–that would really have been something. Someone just like me who I could always depend on, who would be there to play with and comfort me no matter what. Twins, I believed, were just a little more magical. Actual twins can …