I realized part of the way through A Mirror Mended, Alix E. Harrow’s follow-up to her 2021 A Spindle Splintered, that this was only sort of taking its inspiration from portal fantasy. Its true parentage, though? Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A Mirror Mended doesn’t map on to any of the films perfectly, but the spirit …
Siren Queen by Nghi Vo is a book that takes the magic of Hollywood quite literally, weaving pagan ideas into the glitz of the early silver screen era. It follows the movie star dreams of Luli Wei as she tries to make a place for herself as a Chinese American queer woman. Luli and the …
Pages 114 and 264. Those are the only two spots I stopped in Book of Night, the first because I fell asleep mid-page, and the second because I was pissed at the universe. Book of Night should not end. It needs to keep going. Only forty more pages and then the long, cold wait for …
There are a lot of books you can wax effusive about by saying that you stayed up too late, that you missed your subway stop, or that you forgot to adhere to some other daily tasks. I’ve done all of that and more for good books, but The Bone Orchard is the first book I read …
Last Exit is the latest novel from Max Gladstone, and I am here to tell you that it is a doozy. It was one of the strangest reading experiences of my life, which sounds like a knock against it but truly isn’t. Last Exit is the story of what happens after the youthful golden heroes …
Are you the type of person that gets down on a high realism tabletop RPG? Maybe you read Wikipedia articles of living conditions in medieval Budapest for fun? If so, Age of Ash is an upcoming novel from The Expanse co-author Daniel Abraham and it is for you. Much like The Expanse, Age of Ash …
This book, friends. THIS BOOK. Do you want to read something you will then have to close and hug to your chest partway through? Do you want to read a book that never flinches from the truth but never gives up on beauty? Do you want a queer loves story, a celebration of so many …
Zychtykas Three—Kas—is a broke mecha scholar from offworld. Zhi is a broke mecha fighter and also a broken mech fighter, using whatever she can scrape together to enhance an antique model for modern pit fights. When their lives collide, all manner of sparks start flying, although they have to risk everything to keep those sparks …
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 …
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 …