Book #174 of 2026: Blacktail by Scott Hawkins This horror-tinged magical realist novel starts out well, with a clear declaration of bloody purpose. It’s a story with a mostly animal cast, and it begins with our young wolf protagonist falling in love and mating with a pet dog chained outside near his woods. When the …
Tag Archives: fantasy
Book Review: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
Book #167 of 2026: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow A lovely time-travel fairy tale, in which a modern scholar — not from our world, but one that at least has guns and automobiles and newsreels, with a general impression of early 20th century Britain / Garth Nix’s Ancelstierre — is sent 900 years into …
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Book Review: Threshing Day by Rebecca Yarros
Book #165 of 2026: Threshing Day by Rebecca Yarros A curious little book of Empyrean short stories, set both before and during the events of the novels that have been released thus far. These thirteen tales are all fairly discrete from one another without any cohesive larger narrative, and they each follow a different viewpoint …
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Book Review: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Book #163 of 2026: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Ana and Din Mysteries #1) [Note: I checked out this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke today!] An …
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Book Review: Zell by Victoria Goddard
Book #161 of 2026: Zell by Victoria Goddard I always feel a slight twinge about reviewing and rating a ‘book’ this short — only 6000 words! — but since I bought the ebook and it has its own Goodreads entry, I suppose it’s fair game. (And it balances out with the multiple 900-page tomes that …
Book Review: The Gates of Midnight by Helene Wecker
Book #157 of 2026: The Gates of Midnight by Helene Wecker (The Golem and the Jinni #3) I’ve never gone back to reread either The Golem and the Jinni or its sequel The Hidden Palace — each of which I enjoyed at the time! — so it’s possible that this third and purportedly final volume …
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Book Review: Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
Book #156 of 2026: Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend (Nevermoor #3) This middle-grade fantasy series continues to read like a Star Wars temptation plot wedged into a whimsical Harry Potter-meets-Roald Dahl magical setting, but I do think the storytelling has been improving with every successive volume. Our heroine is now thirteen …
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Book Review: The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson
Book #154 of 2026: The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson (Hoid’s Travails #3) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is the first official release in author Brandon Sanderson’s “Hoid’s Travails” series, which is the name he’s now retroactively applying to his earlier volumes Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and …
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Book Review: Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo
Book #153 of 2026: Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #3) A decent conclusion to this urban fantasy trilogy, although I think the way the demon villain is finally defeated after so much build-up isn’t entirely satisfactory. It feels as though author Leigh Bardugo may have written herself into a corner there, which has …
Book Review: One Jar of Magic by Corey Ann Haydu
Book #147 of 2026: One Jar of Magic by Corey Ann Haydu As with author Corey Ann Haydu’s later middle-grade fantasy novel The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene, this 2021 title stands out in that genre for its realistic portrayal of an unhealthy household dynamic for its twelve-year-old protagonist. Here, though, the adults aren’t simply …
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