Book #20 of 2026: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones This 1984 fantasy novel offers a weird and problematic little bildungsroman. Author Diana Wynne Jones excels as usual at the quotidian slice-of-life business and the unexpected intrusion of magic into the ordinary, but there are a few major hurdles that readers will need to …
Continue reading “Book Review: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones”
Book #17 of 2026: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling This horror-fantasy title has potential, but the novella format ultimately works against it by not offering enough room for adequate development of its ideas. An herbalist and shipping magnate in a blockaded city becomes aware of a strange new illness spreading through the population, rendering its …
Continue reading “Book Review: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling”
Book #13 of 2026: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor I got my hopes up during the introduction to this collection, in which series editor John Joseph Adams explains the selection methodology: he himself read several thousand short stories of genre fiction published throughout a single calendar year, aiming …
Book #10 of 2026: Tales from the Nightside by Simon R. Green Three years after the main Nightside series concluded, author Simon R. Green released this anthology of shorter stories set in the same supernatural corner of London. All but the concluding novella The Big Game had been previously published elsewhere, while four of the …
Continue reading “Book Review: Tales from the Nightside by Simon R. Green”
Book #9 of 2026: A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance This novel has a neat beginning that it then proceeds to squander, becoming one of those stories where I can viscerally feel my rating for it dropping as I continue to read along. The initial premise involves a trio of queer and …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance”
Book #8 of 2026: The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar This 2025 novel has been promoted as author Louis Sachar’s first story for grown-ups, but I feel as though it only earns that designation via the adult narrator and the slightly higher page count. The tone isn’t noticeably different from his previous offerings, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar”
Book #3 of 2026: Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig (The Shepherd King #2) I liked the first volume of this fantasy series enough to pick up this sequel, and I do think it concludes the overarching story reasonably well. Unfortunately it does this in sort of a weird way, jettisoning the parts I enjoyed …
Continue reading “Book Review: Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig”
Book #2 of 2026: World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau The 1985 World Fantasy Convention, held that year in Tucson, AZ with a theme of “Writers of the Southwest,” produced this souvenir book to resemble an issue of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales. (Seriously, look it up; designer Donald D. Markstein did an …
Continue reading “Book Review: World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau”
Book #202 of 2025: The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green (Nightside #12) And so the Nightside series comes to an end, more or less. (There’s still a collection of short stories in the setting, which I’ll be rereading next, and a few crossovers with some of author Simon R. Green’s other works …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green”
Book #200 of 2025: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #6) Another short but immersive tale of Cleric Chih on their wanderings around this East Asian-inspired fantasy land, recording local stories and trying to sift fact from legend. As usual it’s a fairly standalone adventure that doesn’t rely on readers …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more