Book #54 of 2019: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (The Dark Star Trilogy #1) This is a dense and somewhat oblique fantasy tome, richly steeped in mythic history from across Africa. It’s sprawling and recursive, nesting stories within stories within stories, resulting in an epic closer to the original oral tradition of that …
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Book #53 of 2019: In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #4) I’ve generally enjoyed this series of novellas about children longing to escape back to other realms, but this latest installment doesn’t quite carry the same magic for me. I feel as though author Seanan McGuire never really makes the case for …
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Book #49 of 2019: The Book of M by Peng Shepherd This post-apocalyptic novel takes a little while to click into place for me, in part because its inciting plot doesn’t exactly endear me to the characters and in part because the rules of its world feel hazy in a magical realist way that I …
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Book #47 of 2019: Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi (Pandava Quartet #1) This is one of those books that I don’t really love myself, but am glad exists in the world for other people. I’m sure many young Hindu readers will see themselves in the heroine, and children in general …
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Book #46 of 2019: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller As in her later book Circe, author Madeline Miller has crafted an immersive retelling of Greek mythology, here bringing to life the tragic love story of Achilles and Patroclus. The latter figure has always struck me as a bit of an afterthought in The …
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Book #44 of 2019: East by Edith Pattou (East #1) I’m unfortunately underwhelmed by this retelling of the Scandinavian fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon. There’s promise here in the idea of prophecy and birth directions, but the setting is not particularly distinctive and none of the characters have much …
Book #37 of 2019: The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty (The Daevabad Trilogy #2) As with its predecessor The City of Brass, this sequel displays super-immersive fantasy worldbuilding inspired by #ownvoices Islamic folklore, but not much of an overall plot. There’s a whole lot of political intrigue in Daevabad, but much of it feels …
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Book #36 of 2019: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #3) I always worry that these novellas about children who miss their adopted fantasylands are going to get formulaic and stale, but somehow author Seanan McGuire keeps coming up with new variations that I find endlessly enchanting. I’m not sure if this …
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Book #33 of 2019: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton (Rebel of the Sands #1) Theoretically, this should be a wildly fresh Young Adult fantasy novel, with a setting that blends Middle-Eastern mythology with a gunslinging western. In practice, however, it leans far more towards the latter influence than the former, and the worldbuilding …
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Book #30 of 2019: Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix by Julie C. Dao (Rise of the Empress #2) The first book in this East Asian-inspired fantasy duology remains a fascinating look at a complex antiheroine, but author Julie C. Dao makes the disappointing choice for its sequel to reduce that character to a more conventional …
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