Book #170 of 2020: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #2) I’m not quite loving this fantasy trilogy, but the second volume is a major improvement, offering an expansive plot of castle intrigue and warfare preparations in place of the somewhat stilted morality play of the first novel. The addition …
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Book #166 of 2020: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust I like how this new fantasy novel of a princess whose touch is poison — so inadvertently appropriate for our pandemic era of masks and social distancing! — blends #ownvoices Persian folklore with elements of the Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel fairy tales, by way of …
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Book #163 of 2020: The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade #2) I love the first volume in this series, a poignant character study of a queer woman sacrificing her morals and steeping herself in the politics of her people’s conquerors in a long game to bring down their bigoted empire from within. …
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Book #162 of 2020: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster An old favorite. It’s just so delightfully heartfelt and punny, and it definitely helped shape my love of language at an early age. Milo, a bored and boring young child, gets whisked away to a magical land where he must rescue the princesses Rhyme and …
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Book #157 of 2020: The Dragon Egg Princess by Ellen Oh I appreciate the #ownvoices Korean mythology that informs this fantasy setting, but even for a middle-grade novel, it all feels disappointingly underdeveloped. The humor is broad, the characters are flat, and the plot never really settles down into any specific stakes threatening the heroes. …
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Book #156 of 2020: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #1) This debut novel from author Tamysn Muir is a real trip, an atmospheric and hilarious adventure of galactic sword and sorcery that dances nimbly over the line between fantasy and sci-fi. It more than lives up to its pithy blurb of …
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Book #155 of 2020: An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson I like the early worldbuilding of this YA fantasy novel with all its rules for how to deal with the fair folk, but I lose substantial interest once the seemingly practical heroine — who should really know better — falls in love at first …
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Book #154 of 2020: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings #3) This conclusion to the classic fantasy trilogy probably has too much falling action after the main stakes are resolved, and its treatment of the anonymous hordes of dark-skinned humans who rally to the banner of …
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Book #153 of 2020: Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega I simply adore the Dominican-American family at the heart of this fantasy novel, most of whom are spirits of the dead that only twelve-year-old Lucely can see. To everyone else they appear as fireflies, as per the #ownvoices folklore that author Claribel A. Ortega is …
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Book #149 of 2020: A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow This 2020 YA novel has so much to say about contemporary racism and sexism (and their intersection, sometimes called misogynoir), and I could see it both validating the experiences of some readers and providing others a valuable window into their lives. From school …
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