I have been reading a lot of urban fantasy lately, more by an artifact of my review schedule than by conscious effort. My high-level takeaway from this experience has been that I don’t actually like urban fantasy. I often find their worlds surprisingly shallow, their themes uninteresting, and their characters somehow less relatable than those…
Continue reading ➞ The Unseen World Duology – Shadow Carpentry
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 became a devoted Holly Black fan after reading The Folk of the Air series. It has stuck with me for years, and I find myself revisiting scenes from the books often. It should come as no surprise that I picked up her newest release, Book of Night, and consumed it in three days. I…
Last Exit, by Max Gladstone, is a beautifully written character story that I had an extremely hard time connecting with. Many readers who pick up this standalone adventure will find a mesmerizing story about self-discovery, penance, and the nature of the world. Max Gladstone is a favorite author of mine for his work on The…
When I picked up Gutter Mage by J.S. Kelley, I expected a fairly tried and true fantasy/mystery thriller based on the back of the book. What I got instead was a mix of horror, profanity, existential crises, and a tried and true fantasy/mystery thriller. The book is profound in that it manages to both be…
Cadwell Turnbull’s sophomore book, and opening novel in the Convergence Saga defies expectation and easy definition. Turnbull’s first book, The Lesson, was one of my favorite books of 2019, so this next one was saddled with high expectations. In a lot of ways, those expectations were met, but I also experienced a lot of confusion…
Continue reading ➞ No Gods, No Monsters – But Werewolves and Metaphors
Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files has always been a complicated subject for me. On one hand, Butcher has a special knack for melding lore that is modern, ancient, well-known, and obscure into a giant melting pot of exciting action that gets the blood pumping. On the other hand, the series has a number of issues…
I am a fan of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series. I could sit here all day and nitpick the problems I have with Butcher’s prose and characters, but at the end of the day I still really like this 16-book urban fantasy. There are few series that have this much content to sink your…
Continue reading ➞ Peace Talks – Excited To Be Back, Yet Disappointed To Be Here
So it’s basically Dresden, but British. That might seem reductive and lazy to say, but honestly, if you like the very popular and well known The Dresden Files, and you like British stuff, you will love this. That is not to say that Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch, is in any way a rip-off…
Continue reading ➞ Rivers Of London – Fine, I Will Read The Rest
Alright, I am back from my wedding and honeymoon where I read nine books on the beach - so I have a ton of new stuff to talk about and am excited to get back into it. Let's see if I still remember how to write a review. The first book I want to talk…
