Book #85 of 2023: Those Who Hold the Fire by Victoria Goddard This prequel to author Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor is rather short — the Nine Worlds wiki lists it as a novelette, not even a full novella — and it’s pretty dependent on the reader bringing outside context from that longer …
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Book #80 of 2023: Witch King by Martha Wells I am all for complex fantasy worldbuilding, but it’s not a great sign that at the end of this standalone novel, I still don’t believe I could accurately summarize the distinctions it draws between demons, witches, expositors, blessed immortals, hierarchs, and the like, all of whom …
Book #78 of 2023: Clariel by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #4) I like a lot of things about this Old Kingdom prequel, but it’s objectively a pretty disjointed novel. The first two-thirds paint a fascinating picture of the setting as we’ve never seen it, both by virtue of being so far in the past …
Book #75 of 2023: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #8) Four-and-a-half stars, rounded up. My previous ratings for this fantasy novella series have ranged from two stars (#6) to four stars (#1, #2, and #3), and this is easily the finest of the lot to date. If you aren’t …
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Book #70 of 2023: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin The concept of an afterlife where everyone ages in reverse (until becoming a baby again and getting sent off to earth to be reborn as someone else) is neat, but I’m less sold on the rather generic plot that this novel provides as our lens into that …
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Book #68 of 2023: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers (Zamonia #1) [Updated version of my review from 4/23/2020] I absolutely adore this wild and whimsical adventure novel, detailing the tall-tale nautical escapades of a talking blue bear. (Life inside a stable tornado! The famous dueling liars of Atlantis! Impressment on the …
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Book #67 of 2023: Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix Overall I would say that this book of short fiction — most but not all of it situated in either fantasy or an adjacent genre — is a success. The strongest piece is probably the novella that …
Book #57 of 2023: Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick A journalist in the late 21st century visits a secluded island where he instantly feels a sense of mutual romantic attraction and familiarity with a local woman. In the next section of the text, set decades earlier, there are two other people there who share their names, …
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Book #56 of 2023: Abhorsen by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #3) This 2003 sequel is a thrilling end to the fantasy coming-of-age tale begun in 2001’s Lirael. (Although described upon release as the conclusion to the Abhorsen / Old Kingdom trilogy, these two volumes are really pretty separate from the original 1995 title Sabriel …
Book #54 of 2023: The Killing God by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #3) If book 1 of this fantasy trilogy offered an allegorical fable, and the sequel delivered a stream of complicating intrigues amid some thankfully deepened worldbuilding, this closing volume brings everything together for an action-packed finale as the threatened war …
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