Book Review: Jingo by Terry Pratchett

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 Review: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

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 …

Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

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 …

Book Review: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson

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 …

Book Review: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

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 …

Book Review: The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

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. …

Book Review: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

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 …

Book Review: The Dragon Egg Princess by Ellen Oh

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. …

Book Review: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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 …

Book Review: An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

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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