Book #159 of 2022: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (Wax and Wayne #1 / Mistborn #4) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] Brandon Sanderson’s original Mistborn trilogy from 2006 to 2008 fits squarely in the genre of high fantasy, presenting a sword-and-sorcery world in which gifted individuals can push and pull …
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Book #158 of 2022: The Silvered Serpents by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #2) Given the fairly direct character parallels, this sequel continues to read like Six of Crows fanfiction with the serial numbers barely scratched off. (If author Roshani Chokshi hasn’t read that bestselling YA fantasy series about a teenage heist gang whose members …
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Book #157 of 2022: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (The Roots of Chaos #1) The middle of this fantasy novel is pretty good! But the beginning is terribly slow — I actually quit the ebook at 33% when I tried reading it a few years ago, and was only able to …
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Book #155 of 2022: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance #3) Because of the way that this YA fantasy trilogy has been structured, the concluding volume is at a bit of a disadvantage right from the start. Book one introduced a magical boarding school in a pocket dimension where Lovecraftian monsters feed on …
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Book #153 of 2022: Black Bird, Blue Road by Sofiya Pasternack Another outstanding middle-grade Jewish fantasy novel from #ownvoices author Sofiya Pasternack, who had previously dazzled me with her Anya and the Dragon debut. I love this one even more, from all the subtle authentic touches of lived-in Judaism and lesser-known mythological nods to the …
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Book #152 of 2022: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw With one bizarre caveat that I’ll get to below, this 2022 sequel novel to the 1993 stop-motion classic is a worthy follow-up and a great adventure in its own right. It’s certainly far better than I expected …
Book #151 of 2022: Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #3) I am starting to feel about this no-longer-a-trilogy the way I do towards HBO’s Westworld program, where I continue to enjoy the premise and the general vibe — in this case, snarky queer interstellar necromancers — but am often too frustrated …
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Book #147 of 2022: Babel: an Arcane History by R. F. Kuang An exquisitely slow-burning fuse of a novel, presenting the 1830s education of a young Chinese-born translator and eventual radical at the fictional Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University. In the alternate fantasy universe of this setting, cognate pairs across languages have magical …
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Book #146 of 2022: Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians #6) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.] Middle-grade book series are odd, in that their release schedule often outpaces the age of their target audience. That’s particularly the case for the Alcatraz …
Book #141 of 2022: Fairy Tale by Stephen King This new portal fantasy from Stephen King is fine, but its tale of an ordinary kid finding his way into a magical world is not exactly breaking fresh ground for the author of such works as The Waste Lands or The Talisman. There’s also an awful …
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