As I was reading this book, the tagline that kept popping into my head was “BattleBots meets Pokémon,” so I was very entertained when I got to the Acknowledgements section at the end and Wexler said t...

This is a delightful return to the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in the form of an illustrated children’s book telling a story from the first days of the reign of John Uskglass, the Raven K...

This newest book from Angela Slatter features everything one should expect from a Sourdough book. It’s got a strong female lead (in this case Mehrab, a witch living alone in the forest until a young w...

This second collaboration of Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms (under the combined pen name of M.A. Carrick) is very different from their absolutely fantastic Rook & Rose trilogy. That one I think of as Sc...

Content warning for the book: self-harm, graphic violence, and lots of both.Chuck Tingle’s latest horror novel is about Poppy, a fashion influencer by day and grave robber by day. She’s got a solid fo...

First of all, let me say that I appreciate the note from the publisher that the dog lives. I’ve been burned before.The protagonist of this book is an unnamed (at least at the beginning) robot living a...

This book about a princess trapped in a bookshop (the horror!) was extremely fun. It was cute and had me laughing out loud more than once.Our protagonist is the Princess Tanadelle of the Widdenmar, be...

This is a complicated book to categorize. It’s kinda-sorta dystopian, kinda-sorta cyberpunk, definitely a science fiction murder mystery, and definitely a ronin story (though I don’t know if that part...

I didn't have "being sad over the fact that in real life the independent Duchy of Brittany was subsumed into France 500 years ago" on my 2026 Bingo card, but here we are.A problem I have with books gr...

This was an incredible book, especially considering it’s a debut novel (though Kim has been writing short fiction for a while). It has much to say about a lot of contemporary topics: immigration & dia...

The sequel to Long Live Evil left me thinking that Sarah Rees Brennan is being very smart with this. Spoilers for book 1 ahead.In many ways the point of the first book was our protagonist, Rae, coming...

I’m generally quite happy to pick up an Adrian Tchaikovsky book based on his name alone, but I’ll admit that “raccoon PI” was an extra selling point for this one.This is set in the not-too-distant fut...

Everyone should know Lois Lowry; The Giver and Number the Stars are both absolute classics. I was more than a little surprised to see this book coming out, as I didn’t think Lowry was still writing. B...

Arbeit macht frei.The second volume of the Captive’s War (planned to be a trilogy AFAIK) holds up.Spoilers for book 1 ahead, but nothing you can’t find out from the back-of-the-book blurb for book 2.D...

Didn’t end up liking this. In fact I’d go so far as to call this an anti-recommendation; in a relatively minor moment, this book revealed some things (not saying what because of spoilers) about the or...

I came into this as a skeptic. My only prior experience with litrpg had been the progression fantasy (which isn’t quite the same thing as litrpg? I think?) Sufficiently Advanced Magic by Andrew Rowe -...

I am delighted to report that the book 2 in one of the series I am most excited about these days is excellent. Truly a masterpiece of a story. My only complaint is that it ends on a hell of a cliffhan...

An excellent, and exceptionally bleak, collection of short stories about a cop in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham & environs) between the late 80s and early 00s. The stories here are very sho...

Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha is a truly excellent collection of short stories. Creepy and weird in the best kinds of ways, while also having a lot of interesting things to say.It's a ...

This book pulls off a rather difficult trick. The main character is very clearly the villain in the overall story; she does a lot of truly horrible things; and yet the author manages to let me maintai...

Frankenstein needs no introduction. It was groundbreaking; arguably, the very first novel of speculative fiction. It has been highly influential on culture and society, and is one of the most importan...

The is a classic, from a renowned author; first book in the Xenogenesis trilogy. Picked it up because I needed something for the 1980s Bingo square (hard mode), and I’ve been meaning to read something...

Gotta be honest here: it’s going to be hard for me to review this book fairly. I’m pretty certain Jeff Vandermeer set out to screw me over, specifically. I’d read and enjoyed the first 3 Southern Reac...

Happy news for everyone else who loved To Shape a Dragon’s Breath: the sequel lives up to the promise of book 1. I don’t think it was QUITE as good as book 1, but my criticisms can largely be chalked ...

I didn’t like this anthology as much as I thought I would, I am very sorry to say.Part of this was the fault of when I chose to read this. Stories about fighting back against transphobia, racism, colo...

This was absolutely, utterly bizarre. I also mostly didn’t really understand what was going on; I was loving it, but I didn’t understand it. Then there was a reveal that made me re-evaluate everything...

This wasn’t the easiest novel to read, but it was an excellent one.Unlike the rest of Patel’s works, this one was relentlessly contemporary. It’s set in present-day Chicago; no secondary world at all....

This was a decent book that could have been a great book, if Orbit’s marketing people hadn’t pushed it as “cozy” and the author had embraced writing something YA (which is not and has never been a pej...

T. Kingfisher’s (aka Ursula Vernon) latest book is set in Arizona, where the protagonist Selena, along with her dog Copper, have arrived in a poor, remote town after ditching her emotionally abusive b...

I’ve been reading this for the readalong started by my fellow r/Fantasy mod /u/oboist73, so a special thanks to her for making me aware of the existence of this excellent, excellent book. I may even f...

It’s not often these days that a book manages to take me completely by surprise. But M.R. Carey (also known as Mike Carey) pulled it off with this one.This book is a standalone follow up to his excell...

Yet another wonderful Gothic fantasy from A. G. (aka Angela) Slatter.As with the other books in Slatter’s Sourdough universe, this one doesn’t require you to have read anything else. Unlike All the Mu...

After finishing this book the first thing I had to do was catch my breath. Once I had it, I needed to let out a scream of frustrated rage that I don’t have book 4.I will avoid spoilers as best I can, ...

Picking up right where The Secret Commonwealth left off…

The theme of this book, if I had to pick one, is that what makes a nation a nation is the story the people tell themselves. This is very topical; in many ways, the ongoing political conflict in the US...

This is the adult debut of YA author Marie Lu, and it’s a good one. Very intense.This is a Romeo & Juliet re-imagining. Instead of being from rival noble families in Verona, or rival ethnic street gan...

This was one of the more interesting Beauty & the Beast retellings I’ve ever countered.To sum up the blurb: our protagonist Lyssa has spent her life dedicated to hunting down the immortal faerie beast...