Book #203 of 2020: The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever #2) This fantasy sequel is structured somewhat like The Empire Strikes Back, a downbeat middle chapter that recontextualizes an earlier victory as a minor skirmish and not the decisive blow it may have seemed. In Lord Foul’s …
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Book #201 of 2020: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #24) Author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is reliably hilarious, and I appreciate how his City Watch subseries blends that humor with wry philosophizing and a detective story structure. The question for me as a reader is always whether the writer can stay out of his …
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Book #200 of 2020: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao I wasn’t sure what to expect of a standalone spinoff sequel to the Rise of the Empress duology, whose cruel first volume of an antiheroine’s ascension engaged me far more than its softer follow-up tracking her defeat. For this new book, author …
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Book #191 of 2020: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown (A Song of Wraiths and Ruin #1) Although I have questions about some of the character motivations, this is a strong debut novel from author Roseanne A. Brown, with interesting fantasy worldbuilding drawn from #ownvoices West African folklore, an all-black cast, …
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Book #190 of 2020: Willow Moss and the Lost Day by Dominique Valente (Starfell #1) A whimsical yet somewhat generic children’s fantasy novel. I’d still maybe recommend it to kids or their parents who are tired of rereading classics like The Enchanted Forest Chronicles and The Two Princesses of Bamarre, but there’s not really much …
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Book #188 of 2020: Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever #1) On the surface, this 1977 novel is a Narnia-style portal fantasy, in which a person from our reality travels to another and gets caught up in an epic quest. The lush worldbuilding is as intricate and …
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Book #186 of 2020: Destroy All Monsters by Sam J. Miller This novel plays with some interesting ideas, but it’s developed too loosely to be very effective. The two teenage protagonists, both repressing a certain trauma from when they were kids, are literally now living in different worlds: her in something like our reality and …
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Book #178 of 2020: Jingo by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #21) This is a reasonably funny satire on the pointlessness of war, but as with many of Terry Pratchett’s books, there’s a certain degree of low-level racism and sexism underpinning some of the jokes. (Although the most overtly bigoted characters are generally positioned as fools, the …
Book #175 of 2020: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Metamorphosis #1) This Ukrainian novel offers a dark spin on the fantasy boarding school trope, more in the vein of The Magicians than Harry Potter. The pupils are essentially blackmailed into enrolling via threats to their family, the curriculum consists of memorizing arcane texts …
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Book #173 of 2020: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu Mozart’s older sister is one of those great lost tales from history, a fellow child prodigy who toured Europe with him and received widespread praise for her musical abilities. We even know from Wolfgang’s letters that she was a composer too, although none of …
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