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 …
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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 …
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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, …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Book #194 of 2025: The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (Daughters of the Empty Throne #1) I’m not blown away by the generic fantasy setting or the one-dimensional villainous motivations here, but as a personal story rooted in its protagonist’s gender identity, it’s certainly a more distinctive entry in the genre. Sixteen-year-old Lorel is someone …
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Book #191 of 2025: A Hard Day’s Knight by Simon R. Green (Nightside #11) This isn’t the worst entry in its urban fantasy series, but it might be the most generic. Our protagonist received the legendary sword Excalibur at the end of the previous volume, and in this one, he has to return it to …
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Book #190 of 2025: Silverlock by John Myers Myers This 1949 novel is a quaint picaresque adventure tale, similar in plot and spirit to a work like Gulliver’s Travels, except that the foreign land our titular protagonist visits is populated by existing characters of literature and myth. (He even encounters Gulliver’s own talking horses and …
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