The True Queen: A Welcome Return to a Magical Alt-Regency World
Not long into her sojourn in an alt-Regency England, the not-quite-magicienne Muna stumbles upon a portrait gallery of the English…
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Blogging the Nebulas: The Poppy War Is a Devastating Fantasy Debut
Editor’s note: The Nebula Awards are often described as the Academy Awards of SFF literature. Like the Oscar, the Nebula…
Building a Community from the Ashes: Wild Country by Anne Bishop
Anne Bishop returns to the fascinating world of the Others in Wild Country, a largely standalone outing set within the…
The Priory of the Orange Tree: A Trilogy’s Worth of Dragons in a Single Book
Back in the 1950s, J.R.R. Tolkien’s publisher made a notable change to the book that would become his magnum opus.…
A Tale as Old as Time: 8 Retellings of Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast is one of a strange species of tale whose retellings have eclipsed the original. Just a…
Of Love and Robots: 12 Stories of Truly Science Fictional Romance
The argument against Valentine’s Day is that it is an invented holiday designed to sell greeting cards, chocolate, and flowers.…
Danger Awaits in The Kingdom of Copper, by S.A. Chakraborty
The City of Brass is the title of the first in book in S.A. Chakraborty’s intricate, Middle Eastern-inspired fantasy trilogy by…
Jane Austen Was Never Like This: Elle Katharine White’s Dragonshadow
Updating, recasting, or otherwise reimagining a beloved classic is an exercise fraught with danger. The devotee might take umbrage over…
Matriculate Magically: 14 Fantastical Institutions of Higher Learning
The magical boarding school novel forms a robust subgenre of children’s and young adult fantasy literature. Harry Potter learns he’s…
The Strata of a Writer: N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?
N.K. Jemisin has had a helluva year. In August, she became the first novelist to pick up three Hugo awards…
Peter S. Beagle’s Masterpiece Takes Shape in The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey
Fifty years ago, Peter S. Beagle’s second novel, The Last Unicorn, was published, eight years after he won acclaim as…
Reality and Memory Collide in Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land
In Lavie Tidhar’s new novel Unholy Land, a suspiciously similarly named pulp writer Liro Tirosh returns to his homeland of Palestina,…
Empire of Sand Is an Epic and Intimate Fantasy Debut
In her debut novel Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri draws on the history of India’s Mughal Empire to create a…
In Vita Nostra, the Study of Magic is Scientific, Sinister, and Deeply Strange
Admission into a magical school is the starting point for many a paranormal bildungsroman. Harry Potter is visited by a…
Gorgeous, Definitive, Essential: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
The bitter, of course, is that Le Guin died in January 2018, albeit at the respectable age of 88. The…
Roar of Sky Is an Epic Story of Empire, and One Woman’s Journey
We first met Ingrid Carmichael in the weeks leading up to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which leveled 80…
The Sisters of the Winter Wood Is a Transformative Fairy Tale
While I enjoy fairy tales set in the vagueness of the long ago and faraway, I truly love when they…
An Old Man’s Stories Unmake a Nation in A Conspiracy of Truths
Alexandra Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths begins with a chaotic courtroom scene: an old man known only as Chant is…
The Personal, the Political, and the Giant Robots: Peter Tieryas’ Mecha Samurai Empire
In United States of Japan, Peter Tieryas created a smart, timely novel built on the structure of Philip K. Dick’s…