Fantasy

While historical Regency romance isn’t usually my thing, Jane Austen inspired time-traveling isekai fanfiction is a hyper-specific concept that I love. The BBC’s miniseries Lost in Austen is one of my favorite hidden gem series and when I saw the premise for The Austen Affair, I had high hopes that this book would be able to work similar magic. Fortunately, Madeline Bell’s debut novel did just that all while doing its own thing despite loose similarities and ideas. Over-the-top and laugh out loud funny, this book is an unapologetic love letter to Regency romance readers and Jane Austen fans. While the romance and character writing isn’t quite as strong as its comedic punches, this is a really fun, light-hearted guilty pleasure kind of read meant to entertain. I will openly admit that I’m not fond of Regency, or really any similar period romance novels despite understanding their popularity and appeal. However, having read Pride and Prejudice as a rare classic literature required read in high school that I didn’t hate, I have a soft spot for Jane Austen-related content. And one of my favorite Austen-related spinoff projects was BBC’s mini-series Lost in Austen that at the time, felt like an…

A beloved franchise set across various forms of media such as the recent Netflix adaptation and video-game franchise, surprisingly it’s been over a decade since Andrzej Sapkowski last touched the series himself. Crossroads of Ravens is a new novel serving as a sort of origin story for Geralt marketed as a sort-of kind-of standalone novel (more on that to come). Covering new narrative material somewhat separated from the rest of the books due to its chronological placement, Crossroads of Ravens is an excellent entry point for Witcher fans familiar with the show or video-games looking to get into the source material books which have their own style and approach to the otherwise familiar story. That said, I personally had zero experience with The Witcher in any form apart from 2nd hand exposure courtesy of my dad’s love for the Netflix show so I went into this book with zero familiarity with the IP as a true test of whether it can be enjoyed standalone. While certain aspects were very appealing, this book overall felt like a bit of a mixed bag, ironically my ignorance with the series being less of an issue compared to the novel’s written presentation. As previously…

A love child between the Disney Channel’s Descendants franchise and Universal’s Dark Universe, Susan J. Morris’s paranormal urban fantasy novel revolving around a serial murder mystery. Featuring great atmosphere, a twisty investigation and all the aesthetics of the Gaslamp fantasy sub-genre, this book has a lot of compelling concepts matched with feminist themes given women’s restricted roles of the period. Though I found the book’s story to notably lag from its middle section onward and its ending leaving much to be desired, Strange Beasts is still a fun read, popcorn entertainment read. Whether it be a coincidence of the books I’ve been finding or a burgeoning trend, fantasy and science fiction flavored murder mystery investigations have become one of my favorite sub-genres lately and Strange Beasts more than fits the bill. The book serves as the start of Morris’s Harker & Moriarty series with long-running plotlines in addition to having its own self-contained murder mystery case set in early 20th century Paris. The book juggles two different storylines, one being the mysterious beastly murders of wealthy and powerful Parisian men and the other being Sam’s volatile channeling powers adjacent to Hel’s dysfunctional relationship with her father James Moriarty. The second…

“Mirror mirror on the wall, give me a tale, creative from them all.” (please excuse the clunky line, I thought it would make a fun opening). Anywho, pitched as an original Snow White-inspired fantasy story, Hemlock & Silver is a novel that’s fun and light-hearted in tone with a very creative plot. While classified as a retelling book, T. Kingfisher’s standalone novel is a retelling only by the loosest criteria due to the fairytale source material used. Rather than reinventing or putting a new spin on the classic tale, Hemlock & Silver is almost an entirely original work that reads like a fantasy mystery story as opposed to a fairytale one. Featuring ambitious concepts, creative narrative allusions to Snow White, not to mention an entertaining and lovable main character, this novel was an unexpectedly great read for me that was only hindered by its meandering and underwhelming start and occasional lag in pacing. Rather than following the typical retelling premise of reinventing its source material with a genre swap, modernization, or flipping the story from a new point of view, Kingfisher’s approach is a bold one that follows an original character, scholarly poison expert Anja who is requested by the…

Ethereal poetry paired with a simple yet elegant fantasy story, Amal El-Mohtar’s novella The River Has Roots is an enchantingly read akin to a modern fairytale. Beautifully written with an air of sophistication, what this novella lacks in world-building detail given the book’s length it makes up with in poetic metaphors that are both dreamy as well as intelligent; notably a long-running comparison of the rules of grammar compared to the powers of magic being both creative and effective. (On Goodreads, a 4.5 star rating rounded down) Presented in a hybrid second- and third-person perspective, the tone of the narration paired with the reflective and introspective nature of El-Mohtar’s tale makes this a noteworthy book unlike anything I’ve read in quite some time. The strategic shifts to second person tense and the whimsical sense of wonder really pulls you into the story as if it’s being told by a bard or philosopher. Besides the well-balanced and beautiful prose, the book is filled with poetic stanzas and clever wordplay riddles that would make an English literature or grammar student thrilled; this novella has brains behind its beauty. As far as the story is concerned, it’s one that is appropriately detailed in…