Mythic – Marked for Plot

The Red Winter -A Bloody Debut

Are werewolves going to be a theme of 2026 for me? This is the second book in as many months that did some really interesting things with werewolves in historical France (read this for more straightforward and readable style, or try The Wolf and His King for a more bespoke experience). My partner and I are watching the Twilight films for some fun date night mockery. I really want to read The Devourers by Indra Das soon. Werewolves just seem to be everywhere in my life right now.

If you’re interested in a werewolf story that focuses on hunting one down and killing it, this is your jam. No werewolves were kissed in the reading of this book, and they spend most of their time ripping the hearts out of any living thing they can find. I actually think that a good comparison point for this story is The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, but darker and geared towards adults. The Red Winter is one of the most competently-written debut novels I’ve picked up recently, and I’m excited to read more by Sullivan in the future.

Read If Looking For: brisk narration, a trail of bloody bodies, snarky footnotes, religious zealotry

Avoid If Looking For: deep characterization, romantasy, impactful female characters

Comparable Media: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obafulon, These Burning Stars

The Spear Cuts Through Water – Epic Fantasy told Three Ways

Words are not enough to describe how nervous I was to suggest my in-person book club read The Spear Cuts Through Water. Was it everything I remembered, or are my memories clouded by the pink haze of nostalgia? Would my friends like it as much as I did? Was the brutality and violence of the book excessive? Would I still think about this as my favorite book of all time? That’s a lot of pressure to put on a book, and expectations are the mother of all disappointment.

Thankfully, it absolutely stood up to the book of my memories. I think I liked it more this time around, and I certainly noticed things that I had missed in my first readthrough. The jury is still out on whether or not my friends will love it like I do. My only regrets are starting this book a little too close to our book club meeting – it’s tomorrow! – which coincided with a bout of brain frog that left Jimenez’s gorgeous pose a bit more difficult than I was equipped to handle after a long day of work. However, I consider it the best book I’ve ever read, and it represents the direction that I wish epic fantasy would start to explore.

Read If Looking For: a simple story transformed by its format, an ode to the oral history of Fantasy, standalone epic fantasy, a very wise tortoise

Avoid If Looking For: straightforward storytelling, books free from graphic violence or sexual assault, rapid pacing

Comparable Media: Spear (by Nicola Griffith), Hyperion, Princess Mononoke

The Wolf and His King – Dripping with Intentionality

This book was a match made in heaven for me. Queer yearning? Check. Unconventional and bespoke prose? Check. Thematic depth without being preachy? Check. The Wolf and His King I’ve read in a long time. I didn’t love how they tackled writing the ending, but The Wolf and His King is a book I will be happily shoving into the hands of my friends.

As a note, those looking for a traditional Romantasy story will be disappointed. There are absolutely romantic elements to the tale, but you won’t find the story focusing on Bisclavret and the King’s developing relationship. The book is more interested in each of their personal journeys, despite their mutual affection for each other. Like other books that are sort-of-technically Romances that don’t read like most books in the genre, The Wolf and His King is best viewed as a book that happens to include some romance elements, which I think will help temper some misplaced expectations based on how the book has been pitched.

Read If Looking For: dreamlike prose, characters exploring their own self-doubt, a marriage of theme and structure

Avoid If Looking For: critical examinations of monarchies, fleshed out female characters, leads who are proactive

Comparable Media: Song of Achilles, This is How You Lose the Time War, Spear (by Nicola Griffith)

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.

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

The Memory of the Ogisi – A Haunting Conclusion to the Forever Desert

I’ve been chewing on the Forever Desert Trilogy since 2023. Books that are interested in the art of storytelling are candy for me, and this trilogy takes a different approach than most. I actually use the first book in the Speculative Fiction course I teach to high schoolers. This series benefits from gaps between each book in the series: the way Utomi plays with history in this trilogy works best when your memory of the past book is a little bit fuzzy. I liked the first two books in this series a lot, but this book is by far my favorite of the three. It’s pretty bleak, and probably not for everyone, but it really worked for me.

For reviews of the first two books in this series, see The Lies of the Ajungo and The Truth of the Aleke

Read if: you’re looking for a blend of folkloric storytelling and epic fantasy, you’re interested in darkly thematic explorations of truth, power, and history

Avoid if: you dislike books that lack hope,you want worldbuilding to feel consistent and explainable

Comparable Titles: 1984, A Conspiracy of Truths, The Giver Quartet

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.

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

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

The Divine Cities Trilogy

Robert Jackson Bennett is currently getting laude for his Shadow of the Leviathan series (which are quite good on the whole). However, I think his Divine Cities Trilogy is by far the superior work, even if it’s taken me about four years to read the entire thing (I wrote in my review of book 2 that the finale would be ‘a priority for 2024’ yet I’m only getting around to it in 2026). These books are unlike anything I’ve read. The prose is straightforward enough, Bennett’s thematic work is ambitious and so very different from the examinations of imperialism we see in the 2020s, including his current series. It’s the type of mind bending and ambitious fantasy I love to read, and it safely sits as some of my favorite books in the genre.

Read if Looking For: spycraft/action hybrids, competent protagonists, weird gods, thorny questions without easy answers

Avoid if Looking For: direct sequels, purely happy endings, John le Carre style bureaucracy spycraft, straightforward morality

Shirewode

December this year has, apparently, been the month of mildly disappointing sequels. If you’d like to see my review of book 1 in this take on gay Robin Hood, see Greenwode. It lost a lot of the things that made it interesting, rehashed old ground, and didn’t succeed in raising the stakes of book 1 in a satisfying way. Just frustrating all-around. I think it’s a good recommendation for people who want fantasy gay yearning, but I needed the series to move past that.

You would think from this cover art that archery and action were going to be at least a little more prominent in this book? Too bad! Think again!

If you loved and wanted more of the ‘enemies by fate and religion’ vibes in book 1, you may like this one a lot more than I did. It remains the focal point of the series.

The Sign of the Dragon

I have perhaps an unreasonably high bar for books in verse. Some of my early adult reading experiences were with Jacqueline Woodson, and the few science fiction and fantasy poem books I read just didn’t live up to the standard she (and a few others) set. I think I’ve finally found a speculative fiction book in verse I can recommend wholeheartedly: The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee was a delight, a wonderful read for the wintertime, and just generally heartwarming and heartbreaking. A great book to peruse a few poems per night, and I enjoyed reading this over the span of months, instead of my normal span of days.

Read if Looking For: epic and mythic stylings, idealistic leads, cozy books that also deal with grief, a constellation of POVs, horses (and a cat)

Avoid if Looking For: protagonists with real flaws, dragon-forward books, the thrill of battle

The Four Profound Weaves

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about the Birdverse series, and when a book club picked up The Four Profound Weaves for November, it was time for me to take it off the shelf as well. This book hearkens back to magic as mystical, inspects the internal journeys of an elderly trans man’s late transition, and takes us on a jaunt through several different cultures. Ultimately, I was disappointed in this despite liking a lot of individual pieces, and I’m curious to see if RB Lemberg’s short fiction will capture me more than this did.

Read if Looking For: platonic bonding, characters with profound self-doubt, desert landscapes, magic carpets

Avoid if Looking For: novellas with a clear focus, nuanced villains, action scenes, happy queer stories