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 […]

With the year halfway over, I thought it would be fun to reflect on books read this year so I’m considering myself tagged and doing this survey I saw on Lady Business. If you see this here and also want to do this overview of your own 2024 reading so far, you can consider yourself tagged too! I wasn’t sure how much I’d have to discuss at first since I’ve basically read only 3 new-to-me standout books this year, but […]

This week I’m sharing about some series I love that I think deserve more readers and more discussion in bookish/SFF communities. Today I’m gushing about The Warchild Mosaic by Karin Lowachee, a science fiction series that currently contains the novels Warchild, Burndive, and Cagebird; the collection Omake: Stories from the Warchild Universe; and the novella Under the Silence. This is my favorite science fiction series, and Karin Lowachee is a master of voice, characterization, and ripping my heart out. (Yes, […]

This week I’m sharing about some series I love that I think deserve more readers and more discussion in bookish/SFF communities. Today I’m gushing about Mirage by Somaiya Daud, a Moroccan-inspired young adult science fiction duology containing the books Mirage and Court of Lions. In particular, I want to highlight the wonderful protagonist and the complicated female friendship that lies at the heart of both books. Mirage and Court of Lions are gorgeous novels, and they are some of the […]

Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Amber Chen! She’s the author of the contemporary webnovel The Cutting Edge, which was adapted for television as an eight-episode miniseries released in 2021, as well as the fantasy story “Hugging the Buddha’s Feet” in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia. Of Jade and Dragons, her young adult novel coming out on June 18, is described as “silkpunk fantasy about a girl who must disguise herself as a boy and enter the famed […]

Though this is later than usual, I once again scoured the internet looking for information on speculative fiction books that are scheduled for release this year and put together a list of works that I wanted to highlight. Just like the last few years, it was hard to keep the number of books featured in this annual post to a somewhat reasonable number given that there is so much coming out that sounds interesting. Yet after finding as much as […]