Book #145 of 2025: Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard Author Victoria Goddard’s latest Nine Worlds title offers her usual brand of wholesome cozy fantasy, fleshing out a new corner of that ever-expanding saga. This time it’s a prequel to her Greenwing & Dart series, which normally centers around a young gentleman scholar named …
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Book #144 of 2025: Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle (Drowned Gods #1) I like the worldbuilding and the initial premise of this fantasy novel, in which a student is returning to her magical school for the new semester after her best friend and several classmates tragically died. (It turns out they were pursuing some sort …
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Book #140 of 2025: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Eternal Path Trilogy #1) A seriously strong fantasy debut. I thought while reading this novel that I might wind up giving it my top rating of five-out-of-five stars, and though it falls short of that in the end, I’ve still really enjoyed the piece and …
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Book #136 of 2025: Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth by Simon R. Green (Nightside #6) A satisfying enough conclusion to the initial arc of this early 2000s urban fantasy series. The protagonist’s mother has been built up as the big bad of the Nightside over all the previous volumes, and here her threat is finally …
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Book #134 of 2025: At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #2) The Hands of the Emperor is my very favorite novel, which perhaps paradoxically is why I took my time in getting to this direct sequel. While Hands remains a great entry point for the wider Nine Worlds …
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Book #129 of 2025: Oathbound by Tracy Deonn (The Legendborn Cycle #3) It’s rarely a good sign when an author revises the projected length of a series midway through to tack on some additional volume(s). This particular YA fantasy story, for instance, winds up taking quite a lot of pages and yet accomplishing very little …
Book #126 of 2025: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer At the beginning of the fourth Thomas Covenant volume The Wounded Land, the returning protagonist tells the new one, “I’m on the inside of this thing, and you aren’t. I know it. You don’t. It can’t be explained[…] It’s a question of experience. You’re just …
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Book #125 of 2025: Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green (Nightside #5) This is one of the better entries of its urban fantasy series, I think, propulsively moving the major plot arc along while also delivering immediate thrills and significant character work. After several volumes of throat-clearing on that first front, the previous novel …
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Book #123 of 2025: The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard (The Red Company Reformed #2) This is my favorite Victoria Goddard book since The Hands of the Emperor, which was the first one that I ever picked up. That earlier novel is often heralded as a great entry point to the author’s extended Nine …
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Book #118 of 2025: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks Big on vibes but short on plot, unfortunately. I was fine with the worldbuilding remaining a bit mysterious early on, but there never really are many concrete details for us to latch onto. Instead we have a generic alternate history of …
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