Mark Lawrence is an author that gets name dropped a lot in places where I get recommendations. Yet I never seem to find time to pick him up. His newest series features libraries. I love libraries! So I picked up an audiobook copy and gave it a listen.
Read If Looking For: books about books, breaking time and space
Avoid if Looking For: something innovative in the genre
This book is stupid. It shouldn’t work. It’s premise is insane. And yet it has captured me fully and utterly. I have listened to all the books in the series multiple times, read the paper copies, and eagerly await each new installment. I’m thrilled it’s hitting a wider audience now that it’s made the jump to traditional publishing, and am excited to return to it when I need a comfortable audiobook.
Read If Looking For: books that make you think ‘what the fuck?’, horror meets comedy, action packed fun
Avoid if Looking For: character focused stories, quality prose, books without gore, subtle humor
Sometimes a book comes along that utterly redefines how you view books, reading, or genres. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was like that for me, a book that shook me to my core, and forced me to realize just how powerful Queer Fantasy could be. It remains one of my all time favorites.
Read If Looking For: a book that will rip your heart out, economist lead character, anti-colonial stories
Avoid if Looking For: queer characters living happy lives, quick and/or breezy reads, twists that are complete surprises
Fairy Tale stories have been all the rage for the past few years. In fact, now that 2025 has hit, I’m starting to grow weary of the deluge of fairy tale and mythology retellings. There are plenty of great ones out there of course, but I’ve just seen so many that they get lost in the shuffle. The Bone Swans of Amandale isn’t a retelling, though it does reference a few fairy tales, but instead is a story that evokes the dark fairy tale style in a way I haven’t seen any other book do.
As a note, you can read Bone Swans from the collection Bone Swans: Stories, or you can read it for free here.
Read If Looking For: charismatic and immoral lead characters, dark aesthetics, unique narrative voice, exquisite prose
Avoid if Looking For: straightforward thematic messages, ‘good’ characters
Historical Fantasy isn’t my go-to subgenre, but The Fox Wife grabbed my attention from the cover art and a plot summary that had me intrigued. Foxes have been a running theme of my reading for around a year, with them popping up in expected and unexpected places, so it felt apt from a motif standpoint as well.
Read If Looking For: atmospheric books, Chinese and Japanese historical settings, few fantastic elements, charismatic characters, feminist themes
Avoid if Looking For: tightly-written mysteries, political intrigue, or action scenes
Tarot Readings and Psychics have never really been my thing. I like the idea of them, the layers of meaning in the cards over time and how they represent core aspects of the human experience. However, I don’t particularly subscribe to the more supernatural aspects of them in real life. In Fantasy however, I find them a delight. And my favorite thing about The Mask of Mirrors (and its sequels) is that the in-universe Tarot analogue, aside from being wonderfully designed, was used by the authors as part of the writing process. Every card reading in the story – with one notable exception – was done in real time in our physical world, and the results were the ones used in-universe, helping to drive narrative beats and character arcs. It shouldn’t work, but M.A. Carrick show their writing chops by turning what could be a disaster, into a really excellently crafted trilogy.
Read If Looking For: deeply realized cultures and characters, con artists, lavish descriptions of clothing, queernorm worlds
Avoid if Looking For: a fast paced story, or one that prioritizes action scenes
The Tainted Cup was one of my more anticipated reads of the year. I loved Bennett’s Divine Cities, but found Foundryside to be aggressively mediocre despite hitting nearly every trope I enjoyed at the time. I am very appreciative that The Tainted Cup has more in common with the former than the latter.
Read If Looking For: a classic murder mystery book in an epic fantasy world
Avoid if Looking For: you don’t enjoy Sherlock Holmes
I came to the Bone Ships as part of r/Fantasy’s bingo project, looking for an interesting book for the ‘Weird Ecology’ square in 2023. This book came with a lot of accolades and, while I didn’t find all of it to my taste, it was good enough for me to read the sequels, which quickly cemented the series as some of my all time favorites.
Read If Looking For: dark and gritty stories, secondary worlds that don’t evoke real world cultures, books on ships
Avoid if Looking For: an upbeat read where everything goes well for the main character
I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. I was an English major in college. I read lots of fantasy books with invented words in them. I enjoy puzzles. And yet, never have I loved being so utterly lost in the beautiful red tape of titles and ranks in the Elven royal court in The Goblin Emperor.
Read if Looking For: the daily life of an unassuming Emperor, hopeful books, baroque invented fantasy language use
Avoid if Looking For: political intrigue as a developed plotline
I have long been chasing classic epic fantasy stories featuring gay characters, and have been disappointed over and over again. I love romances (and read many of them) but finding stories focused on gay men where romance plot structures don’t dominate is horribly difficult. I put of reading The Spear Cuts Through Water for a long time, out of fear it would not live up to my hopes for it. When I read it, I discovered the best book I’ve ever read.
Read If Looking For: ambitious books, mythic style writing, heartrending and terrifying characters
Avoid if Looking For: a straightforward story
Marked for Plot 