Book #145 of 2018: Playing with Fire by Derek Landy (Skulduggery Pleasant #2) Tighter and funnier than the first book, which was already a solid piece of children’s urban fantasy. Having introduced this world and its characters in the previous volume, author Derek Landy is here free to simply set them loose on their next …
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Book #121 of 2018: Skullduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy (Skullduggery Pleasant #1) Fantasy novels about a child discovering a hidden world of magic alongside our own are a dime a dozen at this point, and this book is a fine exemplar that doesn’t really distinguish itself in such a crowded field. I especially wish that …
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Book #114 of 2018: Renegades by Marissa Meyer (Renegades #1) The beginning of this YA superhero novel creaks under the weight of so much exposition, and when author Marissa Meyer does manage to show and not tell, the results generally feel more like standard comic book cliches than anything particularly original. Remembering how I hadn’t …
Book #107 of 2018: Night of Cake & Puppets by Laini Taylor Laini Taylor is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, thanks to the gorgeous emotional landscapes that her lyrical prose always ends up painting for me. In this short book, she uses that gift — and the help of actual illustrations from her …
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Book #102 of 2018: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #5) The flashback-centric Wizard and Glass is my favorite novel in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower sequence, but I’m willing to entertain arguments that this next book is its best. The setting has been firmly established at this point, and King …
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Book #100 of 2018: The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner (The Queen’s Thief #2) In principle this is a fine follow-up to The Thief, although it shares that novel’s predilection for hiding character plans and motives from readers even when they’re pretty easy to guess. It expands this Greek-flavored fantasy world a little, …
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Book #98 of 2018: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman Practically from the start, I’ve been reeling over the emotional journey that the heroine makes in this intensely personal fantasy novel. Largely eschewing the traditional genre focus on epic quests, author Rachel Hartman has instead written a powerful meditation on trauma, grief, and healing …
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Book #91 of 2018: Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #4) A solid but kind of unremarkable Tortall adventure. The Protector of the Small series is generally marketed as a quartet, but it honestly feels more like a cohesive trilogy followed by this somewhat vestigial afterthought. I’m not trying to be too …
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Book #86 of 2018: Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (Enchanted Forest Chronicles #4) More or less a return to form after the disappointing third book in this children’s fantasy series. I wish this final volume hadn’t skipped forward 17 years after the last book’s cliffhanger, but the new story is fun enough and …
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Book #83 of 2018: Ship of Destiny by Robin Hobb (Liveship Traders #3) The Liveship Traders trilogy has been steadily improving as it goes along, and this action-packed final volume is particularly great for weaving back together the various storylines that have diverged over the course of the previous novels. It’s downright thrilling to see …
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