Marked for Plot

Lifelode – A Domestic Fantasy to Chew On

I am so happy that I read Lifelode. It isn’t a perfect book, but I love how it defies easy comparisons and pushed boundaries of fantasy in the 2000s structurally and thematically. It’s got delightfully weird worldbuilding and, if pressed, would use One Hundred Years of Solitude as the closest comparison I’ve read (though even that isn’t right). More selfishly, it’s also probably one of the best books I’ve read for a book club, simply because I think Lifelode makes so many bold choices that will spark interesting discussion. Certainly my views here on how Walton handled theme don’t seem to be universally shared amongst those who, like me, ended up reading far ahead for our midway discussion. Lifelode isn’t necessarily a dense book, but there’s a lot of interesting choices here which set a great foundation for discussion whether you loved or hated the directions the story took.

The Premise:
Applekirk is a rural farming town run by a lord and his family, who live in a large manor. Taveth is one of the four adults of the marriage, committed to maintaining the house. One of her husbands is Lord, another manages the sheep and farms. Meanwhile Chayra, the other wife of the house, has found joy in throwing pots. Their lives are thrown out of routine with the arrival of a flirtatious travelling scholar, a meanspirited ancestor to one of Taveth’s husbands, and a priestess of the goddess of marriage who has been sent to bring said ancestor to the goddess’ justice. Just as important, however, is the harvest and all preparations it requires.

Read if Looking For: books without easy comparisons, celebration of traditionally feminine work, Gods as hiveminds, reimagined family structures

Avoid if you Dislike: pastoral settings, relationship drama, complex family trees, peas, petty characters

r/Fantasy 2025 Bingo Card #2 – Comics and Graphic Novels

For the past three years, I’ve taught middle and high schoolers classes on reading and creating comics and graphic novels. What started as an impulsive decision quickly spun into a rekindling of my childhood love of sequential art. I grew up reading manga (unsurprisingly, I read a fairly equal balance of Shoenn and Shoujo; truly we gays get the best of both worlds) and finding my footing in what I like and dislike as an adult has been a fun adventure. Around November, I realized it would be pretty feasible for me to complete a bingo card comprised entirely of graphic novels. Some of these I read for school, others for personal enjoyment, and a few to explore things outside my perceived comfort zone.

Reviews are organized according to vibe so you can find the type of comic you’d enjoy, with my favorites within each category further towards the top. I anticipate that this is a challenge I’ll continue to pursue, though I think I’ll probably just read what’s interesting and see where the pieces fall for future years. Enjoy!

The Justice of Kings

The Justice of Kings has been sitting on my shelf for a full year. Somehow, I found time to read it right as its hype has begun to fade into the constant churn of new titles being put out. Oftentimes I find myself at odds with popular consensus on titles, but I think this book’s reputation is about as accurate as you can get. I think some people will be frustrated that our protagonist character is mostly tagging along for this book, but it’s a really solid entry for people looking for books that tackle similar ideas as Game of Thrones, but without the sprawl of multiple points of view. Plus, this series actually got finished.

The Premise
Helena is a clerk for Justice Vonvalt, who travels the empire ensuring the law is followed across the land. He has the power of investigator, justice, and executioner at once, and he holds arcane powers bestowed only on those as an Emperor’s Justice. This story follows their investigations of heresy in a small town and (more prominently as the story continues) the murder of a merchant’s wife in a river city. Helena tells the story from years later, candidly talking about how these were the first dominos that began the long chain of events bringing the Empire crashing down upon itself.

Read if You Like: political intrigue, realistic fantasy, low magic settings, religious zealots

Avoid if You Dislike: extended courtroom scenes, proactive protagonists, traditional mystery plotlines

The Outcast Mage

Will February be the month of aggressively mediocre reads? Unclear, but if the last few books I finished are any indication it might be. The Outcast Mage reminded me that I need to DNF more, but kept luring me back in with interesting little tibits. Just as I was about to quit I learn that the spy priest is gay and eyeing up his bodyguard. I can’t stop there! Sadly, this book never quite came together for me, but I think could be a good fit for someone looking for a straightforward and modern take on Epic Fantasy.

The Premise:
Amoria is a city in a glass dome, a refuge for mages who fled persecution. Now however, they perpetrate many of the same crimes against those without magic. Naila lives between: she has the power to sense magic – and is thus a mage – but has now power herself. She is both with and without magic, trapped between two worlds who both view her with suspicion. This is mainly her story, but we also follow the city’s most powerful and arrogant mage, a senator who is Aunt to Naila’s best friend, a spy priest from the country who long-ago hunted down mages, and a strange woman wandering the countryside investigating mysterious calamities.

Read if Looking For: chosen ones, magic as an analogue for xenophobia, straightforward writing

Avoid if Looking For: intense characterization, nuanced villains, lots of dragons (more in the sequels?)

The Warden

If I’m being blunt, there wasn’t much drawing me to The Warden when I saw the audiobook in my public library’s catalog. It seemed like fairly traditional fantasy fare, but with a queer necromancer that wasn’t The Locked Tomb. The thing that actually hooked me? The anticipated wait for a hold to come up was over a year long. Surely something that in-demand is worth the wait? This book didn’t reinvent my reading life, won’t make my favorites list, but it absolutely was a fun farmtown fantasy filled with plenty of things to love in a 300 page package.

The Premise:
Aelis is a new Warden. She’s a prodigy able to manipulate magic from three fields of magic and the son of one of the country’s richest men. That didn’t stop her from getting placed at the very edge of the Country, near the frontier that serves as no-man’s land between Aelis’ people and the Orcs. Turns out everyone is terrified of a necromancer walking amongst them, there’s a few dangers and mysteries she didn’t expect, and a crumbling wizard’s tower in desperate need of a roof and a door. Before she can tackle any of those problems, she’s got to earn the trust of the locals.

Read if Looking For: classic D&D fantasy trappings, slow pacing, city-slicker arrogance, small towns with more secrets than one could reasonably expect

Avoid if Looking For: dynamic sapphic romances, skeletons everywhere, action galore, corny D&D humor

December/January DNFs

Every year I say I’ll get better at DNFing books, and I feel like I’m never making forward progress on that front. There are too many books on my TBR to waste my time on something I’m not enjoying. I must keep telling myself this over and over. Of these, I’m only particularly interested in returning to Mercy Makers, and then only in a different format.

r/Fantasy 2025 Bingo Card #1 – Achillean Protagonists

This year for my r/fantasy book bingo challenge, I decided to limit myself to reading books exclusively with queer male protagonists. Specifically, I wanted to focus on gay/bi men in non-Romance stories when possible. I love romance books, but I wanted to push into some more ambitious spaces with this project. I ended up reading some books that easily fall into my all-time favorites. I also ended up with two more cards (a graphic novels card that I’m working on a post for and a ‘leftovers’ card when I realized I had enough books that worked for a third), but this was my focus for the year.

My goal was ‘read some gay shit and have a great time,’ and I have achieved that goal magnificently.

I’ve included short, one paragraph reviews of the 24 books (and one video game) that made the card below. For people who are more visual, I also made at-a-glance slides with pros/cons for each of the ~45 Achillean books I read since bingo started. While I could keep reading more to get an even more perfect card, I’d rather bank the reads I’m excited about for April and focus on reading other things for now.

Children of Time

I meant to read this book ages ago, but my dad (who never reads) picked it up off my bookshelf while visiting and took it back to Kansas. I finally resigned myself to not getting it back and grabbed another from a used bookstore. I’ve only read one other book from Tchaikovsky, and this confirmed that I like his books a lot, but they’re probably only for when I’m in the mood for something on the more breezy/readable end of things.

The Premise:
A planet was terraformed, meant to be home to monkeys infested with an evolutionary super-virus to help them prepare a civilization for humans to inherit. Things went wrong, and invertebrates ended up with the virus instead. We follow two societies across thousands of years: the spiders who raise from a simple hunter/gatherer society into spacefaring astronauts, and a spaceship carrying what may be the last of humanity, seeking one of the homeworlds. They will only briefly interact in this book, as their storylines largely remain separate but for a few discrete moments in time.

Read if Looking For: so many spiders, batshit crazy worldbuilding, spaceship politics

Avoid if Looking For: inhuman narration, stories focusing on first contact, messy thematic work

Tongues

It has taken me much longer to write this review than is normal. It’s tough to figure out how to talk about this book, or why I enjoyed it so much. I found this to be a bit like trying to point out a bird in the forest. The problem lay not with getting a friend to find the bird on the tree, but rather trying to get them looking at the right tree in the first place. Too zoomed in on specifics and a review loses any sense of cohesion, but too zoomed out and you have nothing interesting to say. There’s a lot to say about Tongues. Even when I end up disliking the choices an author makes in stories like this, I appreciate the gradual blurring of lines between Literary Fiction and Genre Fantasy. Thankfully though, I ended up liking Tongues a lot.

The Premise
This is a book that takes a bunch of elements from Greek myth (or, our cultural ideas about Greek Myth smashed into something eldritch and ancient) and fast-forwards the see how they’re interacting with the modern world. Prometheus befriends the Eagle who eats his liver each day. A teenager with a teddy bear on his back wanders through the war-torn landscape of Afghanistan. A girl is tasked by eldritch creatures to kill a god. A mysterious cult is gaining prominence in the region.

Read if Looking For:
– something weird
-something disturbing
– something baroque

Avoid if Looking For:
– something quick
-something sweet
– something simple

Striker V: Elements of Change

This was meant to be a book I read when I was on the treadmill, taking a break from curriculum writing, or when I couldn’t fall asleep. The type of story it didn’t matter much if I drifted in and out of. I was reading it on my cell phone, not even a damned e-reader. Striker V gripped me in the early chapters and didn’t let me go for a good long while. This novel examines Superheroes from a more person-first perspective than the standard, caring just as much about how humans would react to the constant violence of superhero activity as the fights themselves. It didn’t quite stick the landing, and I have some issues with the resolution of the story. However, it did things I haven’t seen much in superhero stories, and those bits felt just as interesting as The Watchmen.

Elevator Pitch:
Striker is the fifth superhero with his name. He’s got seven years until retirement and two years until he reaches his heroic lineage’s average age of death (none have survived to retire). He’s got big muscles, a massive healing factor, and some touch-based mind syncing. He’s been worn down by the constant pain of his existence, the fear that no matter what he does his bones will be ground to dust over and over while the public excitedly waits for him to fall from a skyscraper one more time so that Subway will give away free promotional sandwiches. The shifts have been longer recently with increased villain activity, and the book opens with him in a desperate battle against his best friend in the world, who has just now gone rogue.

Read if Looking For: mental health struggles, governmental bureaucracy (and sometimes humor), dystopian superheroes, happy endings

Avoid if Looking For: nuanced climaxes to nuanced conflicts, creative superhero powers, villains that make sense, tonal consistency