I don’t watch much TV, but when Arcane dropped in 2021, I was hooked. I’m not even a League of Legends player and think it’s some of the best fantasy TV to come out this decade. The Effaced felt a lot like watching the first season of Arcane: steampunk meets magitech, a city with a class-war brewing, great fight scenes from a talented protagonist, and a rapidly escalating situation. This book isn’t going to win any awards innovation or complexity, but it was an incredibly fun read, and Tobias Begley remains one of my favorite authors.
Read if Looking for: easy reading, action-packed fantasy, hard magic systems, a surprisingly wide variety of assassins
Avoid if you Dislike: the occasional typo, easter eggs to author’s other series, characters that don’t grow in power
Robin Hood is not a story that I’m particularly fond of. I don’t dislike it, but the story doesn’t have a place in my heart – even as childhood nostalgia. Being a take on Robin Hood, I wasn’t sure if Greenwode was going to be a good fit for me, but thankfully it avoided being a campy retelling. Instead, this was a delightful story of romance, internalized homophobia, and the politics of rural England. It’s rare for me to want to pick up a sequel quickly, but I definitely want to tackle the next installment this year.
Read if Looking For: star crossed lovers, characters grappling with religion, beautiful forest scenes, romantic yearning, ancient gods
Avoid if Looking For: lots of dramatic archery sequences, books with few sex scenes, positive depictions of Christianity
It’s been a while since I read a book whose back cover so poorly represents what is in the book itself. Anton Hur was done dirty by his publisher on this one, because the premise for the book is much more interesting than what’s shared. I expected a story about how society is adapting to technology that turns people immortal, with a focus on a patient/researcher and his poetry AI bot. While all that is indeed there, this story is actually a millennia spanning reflection on what it means to be a person, a unique individual, and how choices can echo across time. It has at least seven different POV characters who almost never repeat past a single chapter. A much more ambitious novel than it appears; it reminded me a lot of The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, which is about as high of praise as I can possibly give.
As part of pride month, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and discussing about how avoiding problematic tropes can lead to more problematic tropes. Bury Your Gays (other than being a Chunk Tingle novel I very much want to read) is a classic example of authors, playwrights, and screenwriters killing off queer characters as a way of saying this person was bad and immoral sort of like how literally every Disney Villain dies due to their own character flaws. That trend is bad and problematic, but its backlash led to such predictable happy endings that I didn’t get the same beautiful tragedy and sadness in queer speculative fiction that I could find in cis/het works. Thankfully, I think this is being seen and rectified, mostly by queer authors themselves. I’m all for tragic gays making a comeback.
The Black Hunger is a great example of how bad endings for queer characters isn’t problematic on its own. It’s only bad when used as a way to demonize queer folks. And while I had some issues with the book, I had a great time with it as part of my continued exposure therapy to the horror genre after being traumatized by watching The Mummy when I was five (I still don’t like beetles to this day). Unfortunately, this book struggled in other areas, mostly related to depictions of Buddhism, which will rightly be a dealbreaker for many.
Read if Looking For: older gay male representation, evil cultists (and Russians), far too many teeth, slow burn gothic horror
Avoid if You Dislike: multiple narrators, Epistolary novels that don’t read like letters, authors taking liberties with real-world religions without getting it quite right
Despite being a middle/high school English teacher, I don’t actually read much Middle Grade or Young Adult works these days. Sometimes I’ll preview a book for class, but rarely for personal pleasure. Oddly, the vast majority of YA that I read is horror, despite it not really being my favorite genre (it’s growing on me, I promise!). I picked up Don’t Let the Forest In in as some first steps to introduce more aro/ace representation into my reading diet. Overall, I thought this was a good book, and one that I’m glad I read. While I think some elements will frustrate readers who primarily pursue adult books, I think it’s got enough good things going on to be worth recommending to a broad variety of people.
Read if You Like: unreliable narrators, endings that stick the landing, impactful twists, creepy forest monsters
Avoid if You Dislike: archetypical side characters/set dressing, romantic tension derived lack of effective communication, slow pacing
I’m a sucker for Fairy Tale mashups. I grew up loving Into the Woods, I binged Once Upon a Time in college. Retellings are wonderful too, but there’s something special about taking the idea of storytelling, throwing a bunch in a blender, and seeing what new comes out of it. How to Survive This Fairytale made me laugh, made me cry, and made me cry some more. I’m usually not a super emotional person, but this book got to me in a really profound way. Hallow has a fantastic debut novel, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next. This is definitely on my shortlist for book of the year.
Read if You Enjoy: Fairy tale mashups, characters processing trauma, romance subplots, aggressively paced books
Avoid if you Dislike: 2nd person narration, tidy endings, protagonists not always being the center of the story, books without fight scenes
I picked up this book excited for an urban fantasy with a middle-aged gay parent as a protagonist. It’s about everything you could expect from a book called Dad Magic, and features a lot of elements I don’t normally see in fantasy (urban or not). Ultimately, I didn’t like this book terribly much, and wish that I had DNF’d it. I think there’s a lot of readers who would like it though, especially if they can get into the dad-bod jokes that exemplify the tone of this story.
Read If Looking For: platonic bromances, father/daughter bickering, corny jokes and names
Avoid if You Dislike: different names for everything, suspending disbelief for plot and romance, shallow characters
This seems to be the week of book club reviews for me. I’m very happy to be a regular participant in r/fantasy’s Beyond Binaries Book Club, which focuses on queer speculative fiction. This month brings us to a supernatural police procedural story. It wasn’t quite as dynamic a story as I would have liked, but I really enjoyed the lead character, setting, and magic. If you want to check out the mid-way discussion of book club, check it out here!
Read if You Like: loner cops, creepy possession spirits, immersive magic
Avoid if Looking For:thrills and chills, resolutions to all loose threads, critiques of criminal justice systems
One of the things I love about fiction (and fantasy in particular) is that writers can operate within a shared bank of references, playing with old ideas and twisting them into new shapes. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is just that. It takes a deal with a devil, the moral ‘be careful what you wish for’ and spins out an engaging tale from it. This was a pick for an in-person book club, and I very much enjoyed my time with it, even if I thought it missed some golden opportunities.
Read if Looking For: resourceful women, hot demons, leads going from overwhelmed to hyper competent
I try to read a few anthologies each year, but it had been a while since I read one that wasn’t the collected works of a single author. Dudes Rock seemed promising, and I think the short story format has plenty of space to explore masculinity in bite sized chunks. I’d say that this was a pretty mixed bag in terms of anthologies. Some real bangers, but also a decent amount that I had little to no response to. But the stories that hit got me very interested in those authors’ other works.
Read if Looking For: short story collection featuring magic dildos, himbo cults, haunted houses, fairytale princes, and stories in the form of badly written job application essays
Avoid if Looking For: consistency in depths of theme and experimentation across stories
I’ll review each story in a bite sized chunk below (in publication order), but I want to flag my standout favorites of this collection were Rosa Cocdesin by Aubrey Shaw (gothic), The Depths of Friendship by Candy Tan (cheeky and fun) and Cigarette Smoke from the Fires of Hell by Jay Kang Romanus (intense characterization). In general, I thought the middle portion was stronger than the start or end of the collection.
Marked for Plot 