Fantasy – Page 4 – Marked for Plot

The Fall of Kings – Political Intrigue in Medieval Academia

I finally got around to reading the third – and final – novel in the Riverside series. While it is a sequel, they can really be read in any order or can stand alone just fine. In this entry, we trade swordplay for academic debate. Other than the shift from sword to pen however, the structural DNA of The Fall of Kings fits with its predecessors. Expect gorgeous prose, political intrigue, problematic queer leads, and lots of guys cheating on their wives.

The Premise:
Theron Campion is the heir to House Tremontaine, but he’s more interested in his various affairs than learning anything of politics. His newest infatuation is Basil St. Cloud, a Doctor of Ancient History who is angling for the Horn Chair and a significant pay bump. As the two kick off an affair, Basil begins to grow more and more infatuated with the idea that the ancient Wizards actually were magic, and that the Kings had a magical connection with the land. Theron, funnily enough, is a descendent of both the ancient Kings and the Duke who slew the last one. Their romance, politics (family, academy, city council), and emotions get swept up as part of the newest chapter of a very, very old story.

Read If Looking For: the cluttered posturing of university professors, morally and emotionally dubious characters, slow pacing, the importance of idle gossip

Avoid If Looking For: fleshed out female characters, the swordfights of earlier Riverside books, a book where you understand how the magic works

Comparable Media: Greenwode, The Goblin Emperor, Downton Abbey

An Inexplicable Act of Doom – Percy Jackson, but Make it Gay

I grew up loving Greek Mythology and imagining that half the characters in the books I read were actually gay. I would have loved An Inexplicable Act of Doom, and wish more books like this had been published when I was a kid. While written with kids in mind, I think adults looking for a more low-key reading experience will enjoy it a lot as well. Plus who doesn’t love a sweet romance between a god of your inevitable and unexpected doom with a guy who’s supposed to perish horribly while flying through the air on mechanical wings?

The Premise
Moros, also known as Doom Incarnate, has been tasked with arranging the death of Icarus to appease Posiedon (who’s still pretty upset about the whole King Minos situation and is taking out his anger on anyone remotely involved). Icarus has been living in a tower on a deserted island for the past ten years, and has just built one of his late-father’s designs: a pair of mechanical wings. Moros can tell Icarus is about to die horribly and decides, against his orders, to intervene in order to save the young man from certain death-by-gravity. This sets them both on a journey that will thrust them into the machinations of the gods as each tries to defy what the Fates have foretold for them.

Read if Looking For: harmless bickering, Greek Gods as narcissistic assholes, cozy adventures, witch Aunties who give great advice

Avoid if Looking For: typo-free books, positive depictions of Theseus, nuanced or complex themes & characters

Disclosure: I was asked to be an ARC reader for this book in exchange for an honest review, though I think this was closer to a final Beta-Read than a true ARC. I did also request that Cavehill would donate a single copy of the physical book to my classroom library for my students to read. I think they’ll quite enjoy it.

The Inheritance – My New Addiction

How have I never read an Ilona Andrews book before? Why have I delayed long on picking up one of their books? Where can I find more? These are the questions running through my head as I type this. It is 11:00 pm on a Sunday night. Tomorrow morning my dog will wake me up at 5:30 for a morning walk before I try and get a quick gym workout in, followed by the daily onslaught of questions that comes with teaching 11 year olds. My bedtime was an hour and a half ago, and I probably won’t fall asleep until midnight.

The Inheritance touched something inside me. Not anything particularly deep or meaningful. No, this book touched the ‘holy shit that was so much fun’ part of my brain, which is a part of my reading life that’s been a bit neglected recently. I want more, and I want it now. The rest of the series has not yet been published, which is a grave injustice for which I have no remedy.

The Premise
Ada is an Assessor. When portals to hostile alien worlds began to open up and humans got magic powers, corporations discovered a lot of money could be made from alien ecologies. The government employs Ada to use her magic powers to identify useful materials in the Breaches and keep the guilds from underpaying taxes on what they collect. When a mission goes wrong and she gets stuck alone in a Breach with nobody but Bear the Dog, she knows survival will be nearly impossible. Thankfully, something super special happens that gives her a fighting chance, and possibly the single most important human being alive. Meanwhile, Elias (the guildmaster for the recent mining expedition) is gathering a team of experts to try and close the Breach as he realizes that the survivors might not be totally honest about everything that happened leading up to the catastrophe.

Read If: you want popcorn fantasy with a middle-aged mother in focus, badass German Shepherds sounds appealing,

Avoid If: overly tragic backstories piss you off, you want characters to slowly grow in power and skill, you’ve got a phobia of bugs and spiders

Comparable Media: Solo Levelling, Mage Errant, Dungeon Crawler Carl

Drome – A Modern Ode to Mythic Hero Stories

Drome is probably the platonic ideal of comics for me. It was adrenaline injected directly into my brain. I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I tried opening up my current novel. I had meant to spread this read out over five days – the book is split into five sections. Instead I finished it in a single day that was also filled with book club, yard work, and a friend’s Irish folk music concert. While Drome doesn’t quite top the emotional resonance of The Magic Fish, it captures so many of the things I love in Fantasy and Comics. It honors mythology without being a pale imitation, it leverages simplicity for power, and it uses its visual medium as an asset to be leveraged. Drome is on a lot of ‘Best of 2025’ lists in the comic world, and it’s clear why.

For those of you who don’t read many comics, I cannot stress enough that Drome is absolutely worth checking your public library for. Unlike many of my favorite comics, this one doesn’t have the same density, making it a very low time commitment for those who don’t spend much time with comics.

The Premise:
Drome bills itself as a creation myth, but I don’t think that’s accurate. It begins with the creation of life, but it quickly shifts focus. Instead, Drome feels much more like stories of Achilles, Gilgamesh, or Beowulf. It follows a demigod created by Day to bring control to a violent world. This warrior is herself rather violent, but does her best to shepherd humanity into a prosperous future. As with many of the best hero myths, her story isn’t always a happy one, but it’s one of the few modern stories that evokes the feeling of old mythology without retelling original myths.

Read If: you love reading about mythological heroes, enjoy visual experimentation, want a grand story that can be read in a single sitting

Avoid If: simple and predictable plots annoy you, you need a simple happy ending, lack of dialogue will hinder your enjoyment of a comic

Comparable Media: Tongues, The Spear Cuts Through Water, Hyperion

Beyond Redemption – Addictive and Epic Grimdark

Historically, Grimdark hasn’t really been my speed. Plenty of books I’ve enjoyed, but the hopelessness and gore kept me from picking up the sequels. Beyond Redemption has convinced me that, as with my Horror journey – I might not dislike Grimdark as much as I thought. Certainly it’s reminded me that I need to read more by Fletcher, because I adored The Storm Beneath the World. Beyond Redemption is quick moving, intense, and dark without going too far. The mix won’t be right for everyone, but it worked for me.

The Premise:
Belief defines reality, which makes the delusional very dangerous indeed. This book follows two main groups within this world: a theocratic ruler with manipulation powers trying to build himself a god, and a trio of criminals who (eventually) get it into their head to kidnap the little boy being groomed to become god. You’ve got gruff veteran soldiers with more scarred skin than smooth, a man turning himself into the greatest swordsman in the world, scientists who try to bring about delusionists with torture, doppelganger trying to take the place of their creator, and a pyromaniac who can light a city ablaze with a thought.

Read If You: like an innovative premise executed to its fullest potential, don’t mind a little backstabbing or cannibalism, enjoy dry humor that doesn’t overdo itself

Avoid If You: want heroics, characters who have their shit together, positive representation of … pretty much anything.

Comparable Media: The Storm Beneath the World, First Law, Angels Before Man

The Cloak and It’s Wizard

After reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, I knew that I wanted something a bit less intense and heavy for my next read. The Cloak and its Wizard seemed just zany enough to satisfy. This met my needs for a fun and mindless breather book, though I found that I was ready for the story to wrap up about 100 pages before the book itself did. Ultimately, if the idea of a snarky magic item telling the story appeals to you, this is likely at least worth a look.

The Premise
The Cloak of Sunset and Starlight hasn’t attached itself to a wizard for a full century. When an unusual initiate joins the Order of the Open Eye, however, he can’t resist. Veronica is a surgeon, and the only reason she’s a wizard at all is because she was immune to the mind-altering magic that the Order used to try and remove her memories of her brother’s death at the hands of a monster. The cloak and its new wizard quickly get on the wrong side of The Order, but things are also looking especially grim with an unusually large number of interplanar beings invading Earth.

Read if: you enjoy harmless chaos, you want something lighthearted and pulpy, like adults with functional lives outside of The Plot

Avoid if: you’re looking for something deep and meaningful, you’ll get annoyed with the phrase ‘my wizard’, you like twists to help move the story forward

Comparable Media: Dr. Strange, Striker V, Dad Magic

The Paper Menagerie and other Stories

One of my 12 Must Read Books of the year, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is the type of collection that gets spoken alongside Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang. I think this is a classic example of when I need to divorce my own reading experience from the hype a title collects as it gets recommended and re-recommended. Ultimately, this was a good collection (especially in the midpoint and back half). However, it didn’t match the pedestal I had placed the book on. In fact, I don’t think it would hit my top 5 anthologies of all time, and I haven’t read that many. I think I was expecting a bit more magic, a bit less of a history lesson. And while history lessons aren’t bad, Liu’s approach in some of these stories felt less like storytelling and more like lecturing. It didn’t help that some of the weaker stories (in my mind) were placed up front, and that Liu is perhaps too fond of parallel narratives as a framing device for his shorter work. Not a bad technique, but tiring and predictable when they come in a constant stream.

The collection was at its most successful when it explored ambiguity, moral nihilism, and the complexity of family relationships. All of my favorites explored various familial ties (an estranged father and daughter, a woman navigating the grief of her dead daughter, a son’s reflection on how he treated his mother, etc. There’s some emotional gut punches, interesting thought experiments, and moments of wonder here. Had I entered the collection with no prior knowledge, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

Below are my short thoughts on each story. However, my highlights were Simulacrum, The Regulator, The Paper Menagerie, and The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

An Inheritance of Magic – Featherweight and Enjoyable Urban Fantasy

An Inheritance of Magic has been buzzing around my circles as one of the better Urban Fantasy series to come out in the past few years. This isn’t a subgenre I spend a ton of time with, but I’ve found that widely loved series tend to be reliably enjoyable for me (other than Dresden Files), and An Inheritance of Magic certainly lived up to that premise. It’s not perfect, clearly wants to prepare you for a long series, and seems to be a solid and readable ‘zero to hero’ story.

The Premise:
Stephen is an aspiring mage who wants nothing more than to make enough to pay rent and to start hunting down his father who vanished mysteriously a few years ago. When a strange woman claiming to be a distant relative of the mom who walked out on Stephen when he was a baby, his life is set to change. The assholes of that family see him as nothing more than a pawn, and the cost of growing in magic is exorbitant. Still, it gives Stephen the clues he needs to finally start making progress in his own craft and the connections needed to begin looking for his father. Before any of that though, he needs to make sure that the capitalist chokehold the rich have on magic doesn’t crush his dreams before they can even begin.

Read if: you enjoy reading about plucky underdogs making it work, are in favor of Orca whales crashing billionaire Yachts off the coast of Spain, are looking for something tropey and simple

Avoid if: comedically evil villains put you off, you dislike explanations of magic, religious logic problems put you off

Comparable Media: Tarot Sequence, Arcane Ascension, Witch Hat Atelier

By Blood, By Salt – Slow and Nuanced Political Fantasy

I haven’t read a ton of the books in the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off competition. Some of the finalists I’ve liked(Wolf of Withervale) others I found supremely disappointing (By a Silver Thread), but the winners I’ve read have been universally good. By Blood, By Salt is the most recent winner. Its political and military pitch sounded very different from a lot of the self-published work I normally read, and there was enough in the blurb for me to grab a copy. The story feels surprisingly traditional and old-school, but Odom does a good job of layering fresh thematic elements on top of a tried-and-true framework. Imagine if Game of Thrones focused on a single storyline and was set in an Arabic-inspired society, and you’ve got a good portrait of By Blood, By Salt.

The Premise:
Azetla is a Jackal. His land and people are forbidden from carrying weapons, from holding positions of power, and from living free from violence. He serves as an unofficial commander in an archaic military unit free from much oversight. When a bastard prince decides to make a play for the throne, Azetla finds himself hunting a creature (demon, djinn, or devil he doesn’t know) in the southern deserts. But when they capture her, she has just as much of an agenda as he does, and Azetla’s first priority is to his people, not his country.

Read if: you appreciate minority cultural groups not being written as monoliths, scarily competent protagonists are up your alley, you want complex fantasy cultures influenced by West Asia

Avoid if: you like your books fast paced, want heavy supernatural elements, or are hunting for fight scenes, you want a breadth of female characters

Comparable Media: Game of Thrones, Traitor Baru Cormorant

Wynd – A Casual and Delightful Middle Grade Adventure

I picked up the first book in this series as I collected books for a class on Queer Comics and Cartoons. It didn’t end up making the cut as a whole-class read, but it quickly found its way into my classroom library and has become quite popular. While the series isn’t quite finished – final book is releasing this year! – I figured finishing book 4 was enough to write a review about the series more generally. It won’t tickle the fancy of anyone looking for serious or deeply thematic fare, but it’s fun and quick and a truly delightful kids book that I think many adults would enjoy as a casual read.

The Premise:
In a city where being touched by the unnatural wilds marks you for death, young Wynd hides his ears at all costs. However, Pipetown is simmering with tension, and few realize how close the continent is to open warfare. Wynd ends up fleeing with a reluctant prince, a cute gardener, and his adoptive sister, and his adventures put him in contact with several human factions, a bug-faerie culture in the midst of its own political revolution, and a very militaristic society of vampires.

Read if: you love classic fantasy tropes, comics with vibrant illustrations are your style, faeries-as-bugs sounds fun

Avoid if: simplistic morality will bug you, you dislike chosen ones & prophecies, fantasy racism isn’t a worldbuilding trope that works for you

Comparable Media: Fablehaven, Septimus Heap, Cece Rios, Amulet