Book #16 of 2021: The Lives of Saints by Leigh Bardugo A short collection of dark fables from author Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse, some of which have been referenced before in the main novels and others that merely add further texture to the local cultures of the setting. It’s an interesting addition to series canon, especially …
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Book #15 of 2021: The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis (Tales from the Chocolate Heart #1) A cute little book about a young dragon who gets cursed into the body of a human and discovers her true passion for hot cocoa. Unfortunately, it has a few issues typical of the middle-grade fantasy …
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Book #8 of 2021: The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #3) This is one of my favorite Narnia installments, in part because it’s an odd misfit even for such a haphazard and eclectic series. The fifth volume to be written, it’s also the first time author C. S. …
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Book #7 of 2021: The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F. C. Yee (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo #1) This is a fun little #ownvoices YA novel, a contemporary fantasy featuring the Chinese folk hero Sun Wukong the Monkey King. I’m not terribly familiar with that character, so I can’t speak to the …
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Book #2 of 2021: The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny (The Chronicles of Amber #4) These novels are short enough that it’s never a major investment to continue on with the series, but that also means each volume has limited space to really wow a reader. In this fourth book, a lot of that …
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Book #303 of 2020: Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive #4) And so my 2020 comes to a close with another 1000+ page tome, the newest release in author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archive, which is increasingly inseparable from his even larger super-series linking together everything in the multiverse Cosmere setting. (Earlier …
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Book #299 of 2020: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #6) I’m not a big fan of the first half of this novel, in which the three protagonists — a returning Eustace, his classmate Jill, and a rather miserable creature named Puddleglum — are very nasty toward one another as …
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Book #298 of 2020: The Way Back by Gavriel Savit It’s probably not a good sign when a book that feels so tailor-made for me as a reader struggles to keep my attention throughout. I do love the first quarter or so of this story, which sees a pair of Jewish kids fleeing their nineteenth-century …
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Book #297 of 2020: The Camelot Betrayal by Kiersten White (Camelot Rising #2) I don’t have much to say about this sequel, other than that it’s the sort of middle volume that largely treads water for its trilogy en route to a hopefully stronger conclusion. The plot and character arcs don’t really progress any further …
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Book #294 of 2020: Anya and the Nightingale by Sofiya Pasternack (Anya #2) Another fun middle-grade fantasy adventure, albeit somewhat messier in plot than the first novel with this Russian Jewish heroine. Still, the representation in this series remains charming and relatable, from the opening scene with Anya building a sukkah to her pride about …
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