Book #207 of 2019: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2) This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between …
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Book #204 of 2019: Nightbooks by J. A. White In this delightfully spooky middle-grade adventure, a young horror fan keeps his witch kidnapper at bay by telling her a series of scary stories. It’s a smart modern blend of Hansel and Gretel with The Thousand and One Nights, and both the smaller nested narratives and …
Book #202 of 2019: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Another entry in the burgeoning genre of #ownvoices fantasy books that draw upon the traditional folklore of their authors’ cultural heritage. In this case, that’s Mayan mythology, which I knew little about beforehand. I’d call the result a win for representation, but somewhat …
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Book #198 of 2019: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust #2) I hate to foreground the matter in my review, but I think every prospective reader of this much-anticipated His Dark Materials sequel should know that it’s a book in which returning heroine Lyra Silvertongue gets sexually assaulted by a group …
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Book #195 of 2019: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow This is a lovely fantasy debut about portals to other worlds, the power of stories, and the tension between stable stagnation and unpredictable change. The prose is lyrically beautiful in the Laini Taylor fashion, and the plotline of a mixed-race girl …
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Book #192 of 2019: Sunshine by Robin McKinley This urban fantasy novel feels severely underbaked, like a first draft that was rushed to publication without any editor’s notes. The worldbuilding is vague, and the few details that we get generally arrive via infodump right when they become relevant, rather than threading organically throughout the text. …
Book #189 of 2019: Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell (Simon Snow #2) Somewhat appropriately given the genesis of this series, Wayward Son reads more like fanfiction than a proper sequel to the first novel Carry On. There’s no pressing danger or overarching plot for much of the story, just three friends who still suspiciously resemble …
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Book #188 of 2019: Anya and the Dragon by Sofiya Pasternack I’m really enjoying the recent trend of explicit Jewish representation in speculative fiction, and this new middle-grade fantasy novel is another fun example. The story is populated with all sorts of creatures from Slavic folklore, but the main conflict facing twelve-year-old Anya isn’t a …
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Book #187 of 2019: There Will Come a Darkness by Katy Rose Pool (The Age of Darkness #1) A competent but somewhat derivative fantasy adventure, heavy on portentous omens yet light on significant plot or character growth. I normally defend the Young Adult genre as telling stories about people coming of age, rather than necessarily …
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Book #185 of 2019: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials #3) Author Philip Pullman takes some odd plotting shortcuts in this trilogy’s conclusion — like offering practically no motivation for a pivotal trip to the world of the dead — and it’s easy to see how his populating a traditional Christian theology …
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