Book #40 of 2025: Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura This is an odd little story. It’s a translated version of a Japanese bestseller, and I’m sure there are some cultural nuances that I’m missing, as I’ve had a particularly hard time swallowing the basic premise here. Not the mirror that magically transports …
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Book #38 of 2025: Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #26) Circling back to one of the Discworld novels I’d never read before. I’ve been away from the series for a while, but this one strikes me as even more of a random mishmash than usual, with characters wandering in from other titles and …
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Book #37 of 2025: Hawk by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #14) Way back in the fifth volume of this fantasy series, the hitman / mob boss Vladimir Taltos turned on the criminal organization that had previously employed him, resulting in them putting a bounty on his head and forcing him to flee his familiar home …
Book #35 of 2025: Terec and the Wall by Victoria Goddard (Terec of Lund #2) To recap: the imperial valet Conju, a minor character in author Victoria Goddard’s best-known work The Hands of the Emperor, recounts in that novel the unknown fate of his lost love Terec, who fled civilization as a young man with …
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Book #32 of 2025: Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang This standalone fantasy novel is a total delight, and also probably represents the biggest improvement I’ve ever seen an author display from their debut, which for M. L. Wang was the somewhat forgettable YA title Theonite: Planet Adyn. Her talents have grown considerably …
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Book #29 of 2025: Amari and the Despicable Wonders by B. B. Alston (Supernatural Investigations #3) A significant step down for a previously-charming middle-grade fantasy series. I gave the first two novels four stars apiece for their freshness and overall fun, but this one feels like a generic and less entertaining Percy Jackson ripoff. You …
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Book #28 of 2025: Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland A raunchy yet oddly sexless pirate fantasy comedy. Which is to say that the characters in this story are all obsessed with sex and talk about it incessantly in the vulgarest of terms, but nothing more graphic than makeouts or a naked arm …
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Book #27 of 2025: An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson The opening sequence to this horror-fantasy novel is appropriately chilling: our protagonist, standing between two mirrors in the bathroom, notices a distant figure in the receding reflections that isn’t behaving like the others. In fact, it’s slowly walking towards her, weaving through all the …
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Book #26 of 2025: Tiassa by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #13) I don’t know that I would call this volume a novel like the others in its series have been. Instead it’s more like a triptych of loosely-connected smaller stories, none of which are developed at enough length to really satisfy. Part of the issue …
Book #25 of 2025: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke I first read this fantasy novel soon after its initial 2004 publication, and have found myself drawn back to its wonders at least once a decade since. It is a dense and intricate creation: 782 pages in my hardcover edition, detailing an alternate …
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