Book #53 of 2026: Love at Second Sight by F. T. Lukens It’s great that today’s young readers have stories like this 2025 YA urban fantasy title, in which queerness is totally normalized. The protagonist is a fifteen-year-old boy with a crush on a male classmate, his best friend uses they/them pronouns and has two …
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Book #52 of 2026: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1) This is my very favorite book, which I’ve now read four times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual rereading tradition, but I’m not exactly ruling it out, either.) That’s once in my …
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Book #47 of 2026: The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker (The Prince of Nothing #1) I know that I read this fantasy novel around when it came out back in 2004, but I couldn’t remember anything about it and I don’t think I ever got to any of the sequels. Revisiting it …
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Book #44 of 2026: The First Bright Thing by J. R. Dawson This novel has a lot of heart and a couple interesting ideas that unfortunately just don’t cohere together for me. The tone often feels like it was written with a middle-grade audience in mind, but it touches on some pretty heavy topics and …
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Book #40 of 2026: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu Pretty much everything I could want from a middle-grade contemporary/fantasy novel. Our story follows two identical girls on the cusp of their twelfth birthdays, who magically switch places and must navigate one another’s worlds. Princess Auden is the heir to a …
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Book #36 of 2026: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #11) At this point, the Wayward Children fantasy series has established a clear alternating pattern: the even-numbered novellas contain prequel stories about troubled young characters stumbling into other worlds that offer a respite from their ordinary lives alongside unexpected new …
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Book #33 of 2026: Behooved by M. Stevenson The punny premise that lends this romantasy novel its title doesn’t technically spring until almost a quarter of the way through the text, which is late enough that I normally wouldn’t mention it in a review. But since the publisher’s description gives it away anyway, and it …
Book #29 of 2026: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and …
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Book #25 of 2026: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #10) This fantasy series follows various children who stumble into Narnia-style portals to other worlds, generally by showing us the unhappy homes they fled, a bit of their wonderful new lives, and then the resulting angst when they inevitably find …
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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 …
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