The first book in a new series by H.L. Day, The Reluctant Companion is a light-hearted fantasy adventure featuring an opposites-attract romance between a snarky farm boy and a handsome charmer who team up – reluctantly, as the title suggests – to undertake a quest, and fall for each other along the way. It’s a…
Witch Please by Ann Aguirre was the introduction to the author’s Fix-It Witches series, a fun romp into a paranormal world where cousins Danica and Clem run a repair shop using their witchy powers to fix equipment. While that story focused on Danica and mundane human baker Titus, there’s a point in the story where…
You MUST NOT read this book review if you intend to read Raider and Gambler (books one and two in the Coalition Rebellion: Ziem series) because it has spoilers for those books, and they are best read in sequence. Iolana Davorin married Torstan Davorin and gave birth to four children, including Drake, the boy who…
Freya Marske’s inventive and impressive début, A Marvellous Light, is an enchanting blend of magic, mystery and romance set in England in 1908, in which a newly-appointed civil servant finds himself suddenly part of a mysterious and fantastical world of deadly curses, spells and secrets. It’s a clever, well-written story featuring two attractive and strongly…
I loved Graceling and its sequels, Fire, Bitterblue, and Winterkeep, and I also love graphic novels, so I was so excited to see that Graceling had scored a graphic adaptation. Well, at least I was excited until I read it. A graphic novel should be more than a literal illustration of a text. Not only…
Within These Wicked Walls is a fascinating transposition of Jane Eyre to Ethiopia with good world-building and lovely prose. But a sour male lead took this one down a notch or two for me. Andromeda, called Andi, is a debtera – which, in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, is an itinerant figure who performs white…
Sci-fi/fantasy novels are often written to be read in sequential order and The Last Graduate is no exception. Because the books tell one long story, this review contains spoilers for the previous novel – A Deadly Education – pretty much from the first sentence on. El Higgins has successfully reached her senior year, not an…
A Spindle Splintered, Alix E. Harrow’s wonderful retelling of Sleeping Beauty, stands the fairytale’s premise on its head while managing to hit the right familiar notes to evoke emotions in its readers. Zinnia Gray suffered through a rare industrial accident that has given her a fatal disease which will kill her before the age of…
Lee Welch’s original and inventive fantasy romance Salt Magic, Skin Magic was one of my favourite books of 2018. Like most of those who read it, I was excited to read the work of such a gifted new author, and I’ve been eager for more of it ever since. In Seducing the Sorcerer, Ms. Welch…
Blood Like Magic is filled with richly-plotted worldbuilding and complex magical hierarchies. Overall it’s quite a satisfying and engrossing read, with a few minor issues that kept it from getting a full-on A grade. It’s a full-tabled banquet loaded with treats – most of them of a rather chilling flavor. This book opens with our…