Reviews – Page 28 – Marked for Plot

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn

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. In the end, I don’t know that this was entirely for me, which is sort of the vibe I’ve been getting from Mark Lawrence books in general.

The Premise:
Livira, once a poor duster orphaned by the encroaching Sapper (dog-people) armies and finds herself an apprenticeship at The Library. Evar is trapped in The Library. Has been his whole life. Their stories and explorations of the library end up uncovering some of it’s secrets. After all, The Library exists in all times and in all worlds, and is bound to have more than a few surprises in store for those who choose to wander its shelves.

Read If Looking For: books about books, breaking time and space

Avoid if Looking For: something innovative in the genre

Dungeon Crawler Carl

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.

The Premise:
Carl and his Donut (his ex-girlfriend’s show-cat) get caught up in a nightmare after aliens turn earth into a reality tv show deathtrap. He’s in a fantasy themed dungeon, complete with goblins and stat blocks and an audience of aliens hungry for him to kill in the most dramatic way possible. Make it through 18 floors and earn your freedom … probably. Thankfully, Carl likes dynamite, and Donut likes to monologue. They just have to convince the AI running the whole thing that they’re more entertaining alive than dead.

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

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

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. It isn’t for everyone though, and has a pretty clear style that is different from how most fantasy nowadays is written.

The Premise:
Baru is a genius. A savant at math and numbers, she’s been trained since a young age by the Empire to be of use. She’s also grown up seeing her beloved island home colonized by the soldiers of the Empire: trade, coin, and plumbing. She also happens to be Lesbian, a crime that forces her to repress her desires and live a life of shame. And she wants to rip the Empire to pieces. But to do that, she must first gain power in the Empire. And so she accepts a job to run the Economy of one of the Empire’s many colonies – not her own of course – and suppress their own rebellion so she may grow her own.

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

The Bone Swans of Amandale

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.

The Premise:
This dark fairy tale adjacent story is told by Maurice, a rat-folk who can shift between rat and human. He’s got an unrequited love for a swan-folk lass named Dora Rose who can’t stand him, and whose sister (and whole extended family really) has been killed by the mayor of the nearby town, a descendent of ogres and giants who uses magic to keep the town spellbound. To help his childhood crush, he ropes in the Pied Piper and a few kids who’d gotten on the mayor’s bad side, and lets hell loose in the process.

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

As a note, you can read Bone Swans from the collection Bone Swans: Stories, or you can read it for free here.

The Fox Wife

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.

Elevator Pitch:
The Fox Wife shifts between two lead characters in 1908 East-Asia (mostly various parts China). Snow is a Fox, one of the shapeshifting tricksters who has lived centuries and goes by many names. Bao is an investigator with a supernatural gift for discerning truth from lies. Snow seeks revenge for her dead child and finds herself attached as a servant to a family living under a curse. Bao has been hired to investigate a the identity of a dead courtesan. Their journeys bring them into contact with their pasts and with other foxes who have agendas of their own.

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

The Mask of Mirrors

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.

The Premise:
Ren has returned to her home city of Nadežra years after fleeing the criminal gang that raised her. With the help of her sister, she hopes to get herself adopted into a noble household by masquerading as a long-lost niece and make off with their fortunes. Unfortunately, the family turns out to be nearly destitute after a perhaps supernatural string of bad luck, the city’s cultural tensions are about to boil over, and Ren’s past debts to the underworld come knocking.

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

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.

The Premise:
This book is pretty directly inspired by classic mysteries. Armchair Detectives are the clear reference. Our narrator is an assistant with perfect memory recall who serves an Imperial investigator who generally refuses to leave her house, gets wildly overstimulated to the point where she oftentimes tries to shut out sensory input, and is interested in only the most unique cases. Set in a world where leviathan bodies are used to create grafts to enhance life (human, crops, etc), many people are superhuman, but it always comes at a cost. Anyways, the story starts with a murder caused by someone forcing a tree to grow explosively through a man visiting a Gentry estate, and the Din (the assistant and our lead character) is sent to gather evidence for the investigation.

Read If Looking For: a classic murder mystery book in an epic fantasy world

Avoid if Looking For: you don’t enjoy Sherlock Holmes

The Bone Ships

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.

The Premise:
Joron used to be the captain of a prison ship. A bad captain to be sure, but a captain nevertheless. That changes when Lucky Meas, a legend of the navy, takes his position without a word about why she’s on a prison ship in the first place. She starts whipping the crew into shape for a mission of epic proportions, with Joron trailing resentfully behind. Things are about to change, as the first dragon for many years has been spotted, and its bones will surely promise a naval advantage to whichever country can kill it.

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

The Goblin Emperor

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.

Elevator Pitch:
The child of a marriage of alliance between an Elven Emperor and a Goblin Princess, Maia has lived his entire life in exile simply for who he is. When his father and siblings all die in a mysterious airship accident, he finds himself thrust into the role of the emperor, and finds himself in a world he is utterly unprepared for. Lost and confused and just trying to be happy, Maia must learn to accept being Emperor, because it is all he will ever know for the rest of his life.

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

The Spear Cuts Through Water

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.

The Premise:
Jun is a guard. Keema is an outcast. They find themselves on a journey that will shape the fate of worlds as they help a dying god escape from the Empire that has enslaved it, and the Three Terrors who keep the land under the Empire’s control. But it’s also the story of a child hearing the story of Jun and Keema from their grandma. And it’s also the story of a person in the theater of dreams and ocean watching this story performed. These three narratives weave together seamlessly throughout the book, passing the story back and forth often, sometimes within the same sentence.

Read If Looking For: ambitious books, mythic style writing, heartrending and terrifying characters

Avoid if Looking For: a straightforward story