Book #184 of 2017: Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (Enchanted Forest Chronicles #1) This was a fun fairy tale of a princess who runs away to live in a cave with a dragon to avoid an arranged marriage. As expected, it’s full of girl power for younger readers, although it’s a bit jarring …
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Book #179 of 2017: Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #1) Anyanwu is an African shapeshifter who has survived for centuries by healing all physical damage and keeping her body young. She thinks there’s no other person remotely like herself until she meets Doro, a man millennia past his own natural lifespan but whose …
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Book #178 of 2017: Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce (The Immortals #3) This third novel in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet is the first one that I’ve felt approached the quality of the other books I’ve read in her wider Tortall series. The main character is still absurdly overpowered – she’s already able to magically communicate …
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Book #174 of 2017: Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix (The Keys to the Kingdom #2) This sequel felt like a formulaic retread of the first novel in the Keys to the Kingdom series, which was already a pretty generic fantasy adventure story. I’m still waiting for that Garth Nix magic that I love from his …
Movie #14 of 2017: The Dark Tower (2017) This movie was pretty fun – not great, but far better than the Rotten Tomatoes rating would suggest. Very cool to see things like gunslingers and North Central Positronics on the big screen after so many years. For fans of the Dark Tower novels, it was largely …
Book #163 of 2017: The Gunslinger by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #1) It’s probably been a good decade or more since I last read this book, and I was surprised to find it better than I had remembered. I still stand by my usual advice for the Dark Tower series, which is that you …
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Book #156 of 2017: Runemarks by Joanne M. Harris (Loki #3) This is a fun fantasy adventure story, drawing on Norse mythology but set several centuries after Ragnarok when the gods have largely passed into legend. Still, young Maddy Smith dreams of them, and she seems to have inherited some measure of their magic. Of …
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Book #139 of 2017: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (Winternight Trilogy #1) There’s a beautiful atmosphere to this book that really makes you feel like you’re caught up in a snowy Russian fairy tale. I found I cared more about that sense of rich Slavic folklore than I did about the characters …
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Book #138 of 2017: Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Every Other Day is the story of a teenage girl with Buffy-like powers, but only on alternating days. (In between, she’s as human as the next high schooler.) That’s a fun hook, but the story beats were fairly predictable and I had a hard …
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Book #137 of 2017: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson There are some truly lovely moments throughout this book, and its interracial gay love story is a real breath of fresh air for the fantasy genre. But the disjointed chronology didn’t work for me, and I felt like there were so many missing …
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