Category: Fantasy

The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night by Jen Campbell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Playful, surreal, and piercing, these stories each experiment with fairy tales. Campbell’s voice unifies the collection with a mastery of juxtaposition. There’s a theme of disperate parts. Things that are removed or rearranged or from different times or interpreted in multiple ways are drawn back together in these stories. You can almost feel these knots tightening, exacting both pain and whimsy. A great read to begin the year: a little curious, a little cutting, a little spellbound.



View all my reviews

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


WAKE, SIREN: Gripping, fearless, violent, and uncompromising. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are ancient stories of mythological transformation, and the cost of those transformations (as anyone familiar with this work will know) is paid with the bodies and hearts of mortal women. These are not happy tales, but they never were. Nina MacLaughlin frees the victims of mythology to scream and rage in the context of our current time, released from their silence, come back to let us know they haven’t forgotten their much-sung fates, or who, in the end, was to blame. One of the most challenging and strong collections I’ve ever read.



View all my reviews

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


THE DEVILS is my first foray into Joe Abercrombie’s work, and I may be hooked. This novel is a genuine adventure, with a strong ensemble cast, an ever-morphing plot, gorgeous worldbuilding, and no easy solutions. It succeeds in delivering big fun while still letting darkness be darkness–a playground for the morally gray. The characters are all richly realized, deliciously despicable and endearing.



View all my reviews

Journey Man by E.S.H. Leighton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


ESH Leighton’s debut novel JOURNEY MAN is both gritty and glittering, corporeal in detail and cosmic in consequence. Itself a kind of mythical place for every artist, NYC serves as a capable portal through which Leighton thrusts a world-weary protagonist we can all recognize ourselves in. This book is sexy, slick, and one hell of a ride!



View all my reviews

Red Tempest Brother by H.M. Long

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


RED TEMPEST BROTHER is a satisfying conclusion to H.M. Long’s pirate fantasy trilogy. This installment takes us further out to sea, and further into the forces that govern, haunt, and disrupt the Winter Sea and beyond. Old friends (and enemies) return, ploys cross and double-cross, and Long’s expansive imagination is on full display with one of the most exciting examples of fantasy worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. This is a world and a “comfort read” trilogy I know I will long to return to.



View all my reviews

The Sea Gives Up the Dead: Stories by Molly Olguín

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD sings across the water with a startling voice, rich with haunted children, final chances, cursed dilemmas, and full-blooded enchantment. Molly Olguín’s stories feel very new and very old at the same time: delicate, deft, disruptive. Prepare to be sad. Also, prepare to be wowed.



View all my reviews

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It is always such a pleasure to read Guy Gavriel Kay. He does this magic trick in all his writing, in contextualizing well-known footnotes of history within a narrative style that uses the smaller moments of being alive as the palette for painting characters. And he so clearly loves these characters. Kay’s voice is distinct, and I think that might be his signature at heart-even in a literary landscape where it’s not always considered cool to do so, he does love his characters, and the world, despite all the things it does and has been doing for all these centuries. Kay’s generous humor, his romance, and his optimism are all on unabashed display in WRITTEN ON THE DARK, which I found deeply enjoyable and more than that… also quite fun.



View all my reviews

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A transportative fable (and bonus short story!) from a magical mind. Amal El-Mohtar’s novelette THE RIVER HAS ROOTS reads like something both from the past and the future, where fairy realms are taken as one of life’s facts and the physical forms people take are up for grabs, depending on which side of the fae boundary they happen to be on. Plus, it acknowledges the deep power of willow trees, something that anyone who has gone behind a willow’s curtained branches, especially as a child, can attest to. A folktale for any era, this book is as comforting as a dog-eared old fairy tale, read aloud to wide-eyed listeners learning of dangerous promises and healing spells for the very first time.

Also, the short story at the end was so fantastic! I am eager for El-Mohtar’s next collection!



View all my reviews

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


THE STARLESS SEA by Erin Morgenstern is a party that I am very late to, but after reading it, I feel certain that the story itself was expecting me to arrive, just now, just as I am. This book is an indulgent, comforting, and surreal homage to the power of a literary life. The way Morgenstern builds a spiral of recursive symbols goes up, down, and especially forward. The book is built from specific old rules that govern the magic of reading itself: the same elements can be endlessly remade into new stories, and even the same stories, when they are read at different times in our lives, can meet us anew. The particulars change throughout the epochs, but many stories emerge from the place in imagination where they were born to become important pieces of what we call reality–and this book is surely one of them.

Need to spend some time in another place, entirely away from whatever this timeline is? These 500 pages are a wonderful prescription.



View all my reviews