The Devils by Joe Abercrombie feels fresh while still retaining the style of writing the author has become famous for. It’s set in a new world, our world in an alternate timeline Europe, where the church wages war with elves that eat the flesh of man and are waiting for their chance to wage war …
Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang is written like a folktale, not about slaying dragons but finding yourself again after you’ve lost who you were to protect yourself. It’s a tale of identity, isolation, and culture. The fact that its main character, Kunlin Yeva, is a famous dragon slayer is less crucial …
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 …
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 …
It feels cliché to say, even though it rings true, but Tress of the Emerald Sea feels like it’s the Brandon Sanderson remix of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Not only will I not be the first to say it, but the author outright says it in the Postscript in a lovely story about how …
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 …
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 …