When you’ve read a lot of novels, or this could likely apply to a lot of other media too, your brain starts to recognize the patterns of storytelling that will lead to certain outcomes, like seeing where you have to swap the tiles in a puzzle-solving game. Authors can take advantage of these expectations and …

Brigands & Breadknives, the third book in the Legends and Lattes series by Travis Baldree continues where Bookshops & Bonedust left off with Viv inviting her friend and bookshop owner Fern the ratkin to open a bookshop next door to Viv’s coffeshop. It’s a success, but the problem is Fern absolutely hates it. A fear …

Josh and Steph discuss the lovable and tragic monsters of Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils. Your hosts are Steph Kingston (@StephOKingston), Christina Ladd (@christinaladd), and Joshua MacDougall (@FourofFiveWits). You can find us all on Bluesky. Our art is by Mangoyu Art (@MangoyuArt), and our music is by Bad Sparrow (@BadSparrowMusic). You can find us on  BlueSky, …

Big Corpo “We’re your family now” Energy from Jod in these chapters as we discuss the infamous soup scene, Harrow being bone horny, and boy howdy, do we pick a lot of books with immortals who suck. Your hosts are Steph Kingston (@StephOKingston), Christina Ladd (@christinaladd), and Joshua MacDougall (@FourofFiveWits). You can find us all …

We discuss how much we love the 2nd book in Sung-il Kim’s The Bleeding Empire series. New locations, new characters, surprising returns, and an ambitious but nerve-wracking ending are delved into here. Your hosts are Steph Kingston (@StephOKingston), Christina Ladd (@christinaladd), and Joshua MacDougall (@FourofFiveWits). You can find us all on Bluesky. Our art is …

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is about a group of robots in an unidentified dystopian future of California who discover not only that they have been offline for months, but also that the owners of their restaurant have fled the country. They decide, instead of serving the mix of all the hodgepodge of food their …

We’re talking about Emily Tesh’s new book, The Incandescent, which is out today. Set in a British magical school, it gives us the overworked administrative point-of-view of running a magical school, to what felt like, to us, a very millennial-coded story that was fun. Your hosts are Steph Kingston (@StephOKingston), Christina Ladd (@christinaladd), and Joshua …

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 …

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 …