My toxic trait is that I love cruel morally-gray characters, which is why I picked up Once Upon a Broken Heart. This story is a spin-off of Stephanie Garber’s first series Caraval, and it’s the first time we meet a man named Jacks. He was one of the few things I like about that series,…
What an absolute Pandora’s Box of despair today’s book is. Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is a stand-alone science fiction thriller about a cell of radical Earth terrorists looking to avenge the death of the blue marble by taking out some alien civilians. It is a strange and brilliant reversal of many classic first-contact…
Continue reading ➞ Some Desperate Glory – Infinite Last Stands
Back in 2021, The Forever Sea, by Joshua Phillip Johnson was on our Dark Horse list. I enjoyed the book, but it was brought to heel by the lack of character. Over time I think the book lost some of its luster, but I still remembered the sweeping landscapes painted in my brain by Johnson’s…
Who Hunts The Whale, by Laura Kate Dale and Jane Aerith Magnet, comes from the Unbound crowdfunding platform. The novel offers a look inside a fictional AAA game development company through the lens of a wide-eyed new hire with big dreams. It fits the recent trend of novels set in this arena, alongside the likes…
After finishing A House with Good Bones, I am reminded yet again that I am missing out by not having read T. Kingfisher’s entire catalog. In terms of content and genre, this southern gothic mystery is worlds apart from my first experience with a Kingfisher book (Nettle & Bone), but the fabulous storytelling, fun characters,…
I was looking around on the internet last year for a list of fantasy recommendations from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s and found the results wanting. Since I have a number of pocket recommendations from those decades already I decided that this year I would make a guide myself. But first, I wanted to…
Continue reading ➞ The Belgariad – Pawns, Prophecy, and Polgara
Reviewing the third book in a trilogy is always tough. I’m often flipping between several different emotions, attempting to understand the book as its own object and as the culmination of years of storytelling. Ada Hoffman’s The Infinite is no different and has me feeling the bitter sweet symphony of emotions that comes with a…
Continue reading ➞ The Infinite – Cleverly Packed With Possibilities
You all know the stories. The tales where a man marries a mysterious woman with secrets she begs to keep. But the man’s curiosity always wins out in the end, and he learns something that causes irrevocable damage. Even when I was told not to, I decided to pull back the layers of Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada…
Continue reading ➞ The Last Tale Of The Flower Bride – Artful Arrangement
It’s 2023 and we are finally getting another Craft novel by Max Gladstone. For those unfamiliar, The Craft Sequence is a confusingly laid out set of books set in a modern fantasy setting about corporate employees using magic to fight gods and horrors in a terrifyingly broken world. I feel comfortable saying the setting is…
I picked this next book up on a bit of whim while browsing through NetGalley last year. The cover is striking, but the concept really drew me in. It gnawed at me with its really big feelings of “this is going to be weird, but bare with me.” Wild Massive, by Scotto Moore, is an…
Continue reading ➞ Wild Massive – The Multiverse Is Your Skyscraper
