Split Tooth is not a novel I should have enjoyed. Despite being an English major in college, Literature with a capital L has always rubbed me the wrong way. Even the more experimental Fantasy stuff I love tends to have strong roots in genre fiction tropes, like The Spear Cuts Through Water. Split Tooth was none of what I typically love, but I found that it became my first five star read of 2025.
The Premise: Split Tooth follows a girl in Nunavut through her childhood and adolescence. While the story defies traditional plot arcs, you’ll find reflections on her family life, navigating school, pregnancy and motherhood, and the bridging of spirit and physical worlds.
Read if Looking For: books that blend poetry and prose, sparse magical realism stories, books with sharp edges, indigenous voices
Avoid if Looking For: traditional fantasy plot structures, easy reading
Dark, atmospheric fairy tales are right up my alley, and early reviews of The Butcherer of the Forest made it seem like a good fit for my tastes. This ended up being one part fantasy, one part horror, and one part wandering trip through an hallucination. It won’t be my favorite read of the year, but it was a great time in a small package.
The Premise Veris is just a normal woman living under The Tyrant’s rule. She raises rabbits, pens letters for those who can’t write, and generally tries to avoid notice. Unfortunately, she’s the only person to ever return from The North Forest with one of the lost children. So when The Tyrant’s own children venture in, she is forced to once more visit her worst nightmares, for if she can’t save the children, her town will burn.
Read If Looking For: dreamy (or nightmarish) prose, fairy tale settings, unknowable beings
Avoid if Looking For: plot driven stories, explanations and justifications for the setting, tidy character arcs
I intended for this book to be a light, fluffy read. Picked up in an airport bookshop as something to occupy me as I headed out to a summer teaching gig in Boston, I thought I was going to read a cute (and possibly spicy) romance set in a spaceship. I did not expect the emotional rollercoaster of stress, excitement, and sheer existential dread this book would pull out of me. It’s stood the test of time and is just as good on a reread as that first experience.
The Premise: Ambrose is an astronaut from ‘not UN’ and Kodiak is from ‘not Russia’. The two countries, in a long cold war, have sent the two young spacefarers on a rescue mission. They aren’t supposed to interact at all with each other unless absolutely necessary, but Ambrose is curious about his hot neighbor, and who else is he supposed to talk to on this ship? But there are also some unexplained oddities that are nagging at him.
Read If Looking For: space thrillers, emotional romantic connections, looming dread
Avoid if Looking For: straightforward romances, thorough worldbuilding
This book is a prequel to The Blacktongue Thief, which was a story that I enjoyed, especially for some of its worldbuilding elements. However, I had some issues with the pacing of the book. It was engaging enough that The Daughter’s War, with its promise of brutal goblins, an engaging central character, and horror elements, was a powerful draw. In the end I liked it more than Blacktongue Thief, and the books can be read independently of each other.
The Premise: It is the third goblin war. Horses are practically extinct, as are most of the men. Galva marches with a cohort of other women warriors, part of a new experimental corvid unit. Their monstrous birds were bred by wizards to kill the goblin horde, for the ‘biters’ fear one thing: birds. But war is brutal, and nobody comes out unscathed. From the very first page, you know exactly how much Galva is going to lose, but the journey is one hell of a ride.
Read If Looking For: scary goblins, scary birds, mysterious wizards, the horrors of war
Avoid if Looking For: cinematic action scenes, traditional hero’s journeys
The Saint of Bright Doors (Chandrasekera’s first novel) has been raking up award nominations from pretty much every major award, whether it be popular vote, juried, or a combination. It’s also a book I enjoyed quite a bit. I initially hadn’t because weirdly enough psychadellic tracings of two lovers across timelines/memories/reincarnations/whatever is weirdly popular in 2024 releases (see Welcome to Forever, Emperor and the Endless Palace, and Principle of Moments), and I’d already read a few. However, when comparisons to one of my favorite novels of all time, The Spear Cuts Through Water, were made by some reviewers, I knew it was time to give this acid-trip of a book a try.
The Premise The cover blurb from another author calls this a ‘fearless hallucinatory novel’ and I think that’s about as good of a description as I can give. It traces two souls reincarnating further and further into the future, with a tight focus on Sri Lanka. Each of the ten parts is written in a different mode, or style, such as people in a TV watching a TV show where they are a documentary watched by the characters, a play performed about things that happen in the future, and mad semi-poetic allegorical ramblings about the color red.
Read If Looking For: Experimental Literary Fiction, layered metaphors, books that benefit from easy access to encyclopedias and dictionaries
Avoid if Looking For: light or mildly difficult reads, anything remotely straightforward in plot or structure
Reincarnation and recursive gay romance books seem to be a running theme of 2024 releases. I didn’t read all of them, but The Emperor and the Endless Palace seemed like the type of gay romance that was going to push past the cliches plaguing gay romances both in and out of fantasy spaces at the moment. And despite some classic debut-novel issues, it was exactly what I was looking for.
The Premise: Two men, soulmates, find each other across various lifetimes. Dong Xian is a clerk at the Endless Palace 2,000 years ago, scheming for power. He Shican is something of a lost soul, an innkeeper in the woods of China in the 1700s. And River, who immigrated to America as a young child, is has recently come out and is exploring his identity in the hedonistic LA queer community. As their stories progress, so too do they intersect, replay, and unravel.
Read If Looking For: romances that aren’t quite Romances, looping narratives, lustful gay men, historical queer representation
Avoid if Looking For: saccharine queer stories, or books that aren’t romance heavy
As and English teacher, I constantly tell my kids not to judge a book by its cover. Dumb advice, but I have to try to get them to give Tamora Pierce a try somehow. It’s also undoubtedly true that a good cover is far more likely to get me to actually look at a book and give it a shot, and great cover artists are hard to find (especially since they and the authors rarely get a lot of say in what the cover looks like). And I’m ashamed to say that, with two horrible covers, I didn’t give The Storm Beneath the World a shot the first few times I saw it. Eventually, the premise of excellent fantasy featuring insect-people got me to pick it up, and thank goodness people kept hyping it. I’m now happy to say that it has a third, much better cover (for my tastes at least), and I think epic fantasy fans will find a lot to love here.
Elevator Pitch: The world is a river of wind, through which continents on the back of ancient tentacle creatures host countries of insect-folk with some serious aristocracy issues. Four POV characters discover their Talent, a unique skill your are a prodigy at, but that has a serous dark side. Talents can be … well anything. Pottery, farming, conjuring fire, being lucky, sensing lies, etc. But using Talents overloads your brain with bliss leading to addiction, religious and social ostracization, and the promise of a relatively quick death as you ignore basic life needs to live in the bliss of your Talent. But with war looming as the Mad Queen Yil’s island approaches, these four protagonists find themselves pressed into service of Queen Nysh, putting their powers to use for the good of their society.
Read If Looking For: classic epic fantasy style writing in a totally alien setting, insect characters, ethical quandaries
Avoid if Looking For: books that avoid brutal violence, books with familiar settings
Hyperion is one of those classic fantasy stories that’s genre defining, and often makes ‘must read’ lists. I have a rather thorny relationship with lots of these books. I find Lord of the Rings frustrating and Dune rather boring. I tend to gravitate towards lesser read early works, such as those by George MAcDonald. Hyperion though, is a classic that really captured my imagination and ran with it.
The Premise: Seven Pilgrims are on a journey to see the Shrike in the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. There is the Priest, the Soldier, the Poet, the Templar, the Scholar (with an infant daughter) the Detective, and the Consul. And as time passes, they decide to share the stories that led them to this pilgrimage. This book centers around those tales, and is a clear reference to classic work of the English Language The Canterbury Tales.
Read If Looking For: gorgeous prose, deeply fleshed out characters, classical references
Avoid if Looking For: books without men writing women problems, books with a singular driving plot
Translated Novels tend to be some of the more unique reads. It’s easy to forget how much cultures have self-reinforcing patterns in their writing, even across subgenres. Walking Practice is a great example of how translated fiction can be an engaging experience that confronts your notions of how stories go. Assuming you’re reading in English and not Korean, I highly recommend reading Victoria Caudle’s translation notes, which will provide key context for what the hell is going on with this book’s typesetting.
The Premise: An alien is stranded on Earth, at the mercy of the planet’s intense gravity and its own need to eat. Thankfully, Earth is full of delicious, tasty humans! And so this shapeshifting creature laboriously makes its way through the city towards its meals, adapting its appearance on the premise of a fun hookup that turns into mealtime. When things go sideways though, the alien must adjust or starve.
Read If Looking For: horror with deep themes, gruesome depictions of bodies, gore, and sex, utterly alien narrators
Avoid if Looking For: something like what you’ve read before
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
Marked for Plot 