Book #15 of 2025: Iorich by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #12) In many ways, this Vlad Taltos installment feels like a rehash of #10 Dzur, with the reformed hitman protagonist again lured back against his better judgment to the hometown where his enemies still have a price on his head, in order to sort out …
Tag Archives: fantasy
Book Review: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch
Book #14 of 2025: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch What a delight it is to reenter the world of Camorr, that medieval Venice-inspired city-state with its elaborate criminal underworld staking out rival gang territories along the canals. Author Scott Lynch has published a variety of shorter fiction in the years since …
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Book Review: Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard
Book #13 of 2025: Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard Another interstitial novella in author Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart cozy fantasy series, this time focusing on Jemis Greenwing’s schoolmate Hope after the events of the sixth / latest novel Plum Duff. As introduced in the book before that one, she’s in love with his best …
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Book Review: Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
Book #12 of 2025: Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean #3) I flitted between three and four stars for this latest Fourth Wing sequel, but was ultimately swayed by how wildly off-base the lower-starred reviews on Goodreads seemed to be. So congrats to those users, I guess, who convinced me to push my own …
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Book Review: A Language of Dragons by S. F. Williamson
Book #11 of 2025: A Language of Dragons by S. F. Williamson As a fantasy-lover with an academic background in linguistics, I expected to adore this YA historical fiction title from debut author S. F. Williamson, which reimagines Britain’s WWII codebreakers at Bletchley Park as working to decipher the secret communications of dragons, rather than …
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Book Review: The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
Book #10 of 2025: The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #5) I’ll admit I was a little impatient during the first half of this latest novella in the Singing Hills fantasy series, which seemed to be setting up a fairly transparent Bluebeard plot. Our returning protagonist Cleric Chih is …
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Book Review: The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart
Book #8 of 2025: The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart (The Hollow Covenant #1) I appreciate the distinctive premise of this epic fantasy novel, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by two different magical afflictions: the initial curse that made everything a wasteland and another that followed later and is now gradually spreading, …
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Book Review: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs
Book #6 of 2025: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs The nicest thing I can say about this 2023 contemporary fantasy novel is that it is a vastly superior execution of certain similar ideas from Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors, which was published the following year. I’m sure the resemblances are coincidental, but …
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Book Review: From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos
Book #5 of 2025: From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This novel is pretty YA, in a way that I think I’m finally starting to outgrow as I approach my late-thirties. There are lots of flowery poetic descriptions of how the teenage protagonist feels about her newly-discovered love interest, for …
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Book Review: Jhegaala by Steven Brust
Book #4 of 2025: Jhegaala by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #11) There’s always been a noir element in the DNA of this fantasy sequence, but it’s rarely as overt as it is in this installment, which finds the ex-assassin Vladimir Taltos traveling in the East, far from the familiar Draegaran Empire. (For those reading his …
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