Space opera meets mythic fantasy in Sangu Mandanna’s young adult novel A Spark of White Fire, the first book in the Mahabharata-inspired Celestial Trilogy. This riveting, expertly paced tale features gods and goddesses, prophecies and curses, a divided royal family, and a sentient warship who is not particularly fond of the destruction and bloodshed for which she was crafted. I loved every moment of reading it and have already pre-ordered the sequel, A House of Rage and Sorrow (coming September 17 […]

Book Description: From an Aurora Award-winning author comes a new fantasy epic in which one mage must stand against a Deathless Goddess who controls all magic. Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic. Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts […]

The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden’s debut novel and the first book in the Winternight Trilogy, is a beautifully written, atmospheric, Slavic-folklore-inspired book set in a fourteenth century Rus’ in which the old spirits are beginning to fade with the rise of Christianity in the region. This volume chronicles the childhood and young adulthood of Vasya, starting with her mother’s knowledge that her next child will be a daughter very much like her own mother, a woman resembling a […]

Although I don’t tend to read post-apocalyptic as much as some other speculative fiction subgenres, Peng Shepherd’s first novel caught my eye before its publication last year—long before The Book of M began garnering acclaim by appearing on numerous Best Books of 2018 lists, becoming a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy finalist, or more recently, winning the Neukom Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction. From the moment I read its description, I was intrigued by the idea of […]

Book Description: In this standalone fantasy novel by an award-winning author, the dark truth behind a string of unusual murders leads to an otherworldly exploration of spirits, myth, and memory, steeped in Caribbean storytelling. Dr. Miranda Ecouvo, forensic therapist of the City, just helped put a serial killer behind bars. But she soon discovers that her investigation into seven unusual murders is not yet complete. A near-death experience throws her out of time and into a realm of labyrinths and […]

Between watching the rushed final season of Game of Thrones and reading a couple of recent conclusions to trilogies, I’ve been thinking a lot about series endings—especially how rare it is to find a multi-volume story whose final installment measures up to its previous ones. Many series I’ve otherwise loved have had concluding volumes that didn’t entirely work for me, and in many of these cases, my problem wasn’t where the story ended up but how it got to that […]