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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Book #53 of 2023: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is the second of author Brandon Sanderson’s four “Secret Project” novels, which he wrote over the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021 in the time he’d normally spend traveling and making public appearances …
Book #52 of 2023: League of Liars by Astrid Scholte (The League of Liars #1) I was intrigued by the notion of a YA fantasy legal thriller, but the result here is severely underwhelming at every turn. Take the minimal worldbuilding, for starters. This is nominally set on a different plane than ours, with magic …
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Book #49 of 2023: Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander by Victoria Goddard I like this midquel novella to author Victoria Goddard’s excellent fantasy tome The Hands of the Emperor, but I think I’m not totally impressed by it, especially after the previous short spinoff work for this series Petty Treasons seemed to up the …
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Book #45 of 2023: Lirael by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #2) Another fine fantasy adventure, although I have never loved it quite as much as its predecessor. Jumping forward a couple decades and following an entirely new cast is a risky maneuver, and while I feel it pays off fairly well, I do miss …
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