Happy (slightly belated) New Year! As usual, I took the opportunity to cover some highlights of 2024 and discuss my favorite stories from the last year. Blog Highlights in 2024 One of the biggest highlights of 2024 on this blog was the thirteenth annual Women in SF&F Month, which contained wonderful essays by speculative fiction authors discussing their thoughts, experiences, influences, and work. It featured the following guest posts (which are eligible for nonfiction/related work awards): Gabriella Buba — “Fantasy […]

Happy (very belated) New Year! I had hoped to have this post up much earlier, but I got a bad cold starting on Christmas Eve and it just would not go away. I don’t think I started to feel normal again until about halfway through January. But late as it is, I could not pass up the opportunity to discuss my favorites of 2023 since I read some wonderful books and found something else fantasy-related that I absolutely love (which […]

Happy New Year! Last year was another not-so-great year in a lot of ways, and the last couple of weeks included a storm that knocked out our power for two days and was overall an unpleasant experience. But I also got to visit a cat cafe and spend time with some adorable kitties as an early Christmas gift, and as usual, I read some wonderful books. One of the biggest highlights of 2022 was the eleventh annual Women in SF&F […]

It was a rough year between the ongoing pandemic and then being evicted, buying a home, and needing to do lots of work on said home, and I didn’t write nearly as many book reviews as I would have liked. (And a few of those I did write were catching up on books I’d read in 2020 and struggled to review because of, well, 2020.) But it was a great year in other ways. Women in SF&F Month 2021 was […]

Truth be told, 2020 was not the easiest year for concentrating on reading (or writing for that matter, which is why it took me so much longer than usual to get this post together). But it was a year filled with AMAZING books, and I am so grateful to every author on this list for their work, as well as many others whose stories helped me get through this year. Cover images link to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I […]

Happy New Year! In addition to being the start of a new year, today is the day this blog is officially a teenager: Fantasy Cafe turns 13 years old today! I can hardly believe I’ve been blogging that long. Now that I’ve read everything I will ever read in 2019, it’s time for the favorite books of 2019 list. My main goal for the year was to embrace what I love and ruthlessly cull books that aren’t drawing me in. […]