Adam S. Leslie, you’ve written quite a book. Lost in the Garden is like a dream I had and forgot, and then Leslie went and excavated it. I don’t know how he did it, but this is whimsy without twee. It explodes the manic pixie dream girl trope without doing harm to the eponymous girl: …
You know the drill. You drew your weird cousin in the family Secret Santa, but all you know is she likes books, and now it’s too late and/or awkward to ask her for specific titles, because shouldn’t you know more about your own cousin? (No. She is full of secrets on purpose.) As a high-ranking …
The end of Arc 1 of Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive is here, and Wind and Truth feels enormous, metaphorically and physically. The release of The Way of Kings feels like another lifetime, and yet just yesterday, as the end of the first arc seemed so far away in 2010. Now we’ve reached the midpoint where one …
On this Off the Books, we are interviewing Sung-il Kim, author of Blood of the Old Kings, and Anton Hur (Toward Eternity, transl. Blood of the Old Kings, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-Hee) to discuss Kim’s book, falling empires, publishing, translations, technofeudalism, and what’s next for The …
It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Lev AC Rosen’s Evander Mills series. The first two books, Lavender House and The Bell in the Fog were on my favorites lists for the past two years. When I interviewed Rosen last year he spoke about how Lavender House was his Agatha Christie, and …
In Christopher Buhelman’s The Daughters’ War, Galva dom Braga, a knight from, tells the tale of her time in the third goblin war to who we can assume is her traveling companion, Kinch, from Buhelman’s previous book The Blacktongue Thief. That third war with the goblins, later called The Daughters’ War because the women had …
Throughout The Traitor of Redwinter, the follow-up to The Daughter of Redwinter by Ed McDonald, dread seeped from the story, page by page. A title with the word traitor in it, with a main character whose power to see the spirits of the dead, comes with the punishment of death, and all the emotional baggage …
By now I hope you’ve read the nuanced and eloquent reviews of The Sky on Fire by Christina and Josh. This is not going to be one of those reviews, because everything they said I agree with and they said it better than I will. No, I’m here to give you a review of The …
Ever wanted to ride a hurricane without leaving your home? That’s kind of the experience of reading The Sky on Fire, both figuratively and, in a couple of instances, also literally. This is a pulse-pounding novel that never stops chasing bigger and bigger storms, beginning with a fugitive hunt but somehow escalating from there to …
Anahrod was a teenager when the dragons declared her a traitor and had her executed, but she survived and thrived in the Deep jungles far below the peaks where dragons ruled over society. Her past comes back to haunt her many years later as her survival is discovered, and the First Dragon, Neveranimas, wants to …