Source: Illumicrate

A story of survival, power, political strategy, and family, Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress is a stunning epic fantasy book with strong historical Chinese-inspired flavor and culture. While the story is one of power succession and imperial palace politics, this book goes beyond that through its complex familial relationships and important contextual backstories. It isn’t a simple story about a resourceful betrothed navigating court survival but is just as much about the events and pressure that led to the making of a tyrant and how the potential for power can destroy everything. Tense, brutal, beautifully poignant, and NOT a romantasy, this is easily one of my favorite reads so far of the year and one of the most ambitious debut novels most authors would dream to have under their name While featuring a fictional land and dynasty, the Poet Empress tells a sweeping fantasy story that is heavily inspired by Chinese culture and one that could’ve easily taken place in history sans the fantasy and magic. The book incorporates familiar historical elements of male heirs, large groups of female concubines, eunuchs, and a taxation and imperial system much like other well-known established dynasties. While the majority of the book covers…

Following an unlikely group of islanders finding their way under an authoritarian and oppressive magical monarchy, Katalina Watt’s Saltswept is a maritime focused fantasy novel featuring interesting narrative elements with folklore and flavor inspired by Southeast Asian culture. Fast-paced, straightforward, and as queer and colorful as the fruit section at a port of call market vendor stall, this book has all the right ingredients and promises a high seas heist and exciting adventure. While there is a heist and an adventure out at sea, the end result may not quite live up to that lofty pitch for most readers with the book feeling more like a collection of loosely connected ideas, lacking the development and details to solidify the tale it wants to tell. Described in the author’s acknowledgement, Watt set out to write a book that honors their Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander culture meshed with queer representation, and those ambitions clearly show as easily the book’s best features. While the chain of islands that make up Paranish are fictional, their real-world inspirations have clear SEA influences. While each island is varied in terms of climate, they all have wonderful visuals and atmosphere. The title of the book serves dual…

What if it was just you and me, in an eerie library, with a demon haunting our hopes and dreams, not two but three? More successful than my poor excuse for poetry, the Devil Makes Three by Tori Bovalino is a YA fantasy book that mixes and matches a variety of inspirations from across various genres. Part dark academia fantasy, part psychological suspense thriller, part paranormal horror, this book blends together its different elements to tell a story about two private academy lone wolves who accidentally unleash a demonic presence while navigating the challenges of their family life. Set at a prestigious private academy, the overall story revolves around the unexpected release of a demon-like entity from the depths of an academy library that Tess and Eliot work and study at respectively. When taken at face value, the Devil Makes Three sounds like it’s going to be about occultic research and evading said devil. While the book certainly follows this expected storyline to a certain extent, the rest of the book revolves around Tess and Eliot’s personal struggles, conflicted home environment, and familial difficulties that had led to their attendance at the school. For Tess, her story is about her…

Part Grimm fairytale retelling, part historical fiction, and finally part original fantasy story revolving around witchcraft, Kell Woods’s debut novel After the Forest is an expansive dark fantasy book with an ambitious narrative to tell. Rather than directly retelling its source material, After the Forest instead follows the difficult life of Greta following her and her brother’s experiences trapped by a witch and her gingerbread house. A tense story filled with distrust and suspicions in a rural village, contrary to its classification as a retelling, Woods’s story is largely an original one that merely uses Hansel and Gretel’s fairytale for contextual framework. Creatively constructed with fitting prose, this book was a case of expecting one thing and getting something entirely different that wasn’t for me but was nonetheless an intriguing read outside of its frequent issues of pacing and unfocused plot. Books classified as retellings tend to follow one of two different scenarios that largely determine how the story will be read. The traditional form of retelling is one that mostly retells the original story with a unique spin, modernization, genre-swap, or similar. The other form uses the base story as a launching point for framework purposes only and uses…

A cute sapphic second chance at love via exes forced to professionally collaborate, Love In Focus by Lyla Lee is an easy and light-hearted read perfectly pitched for cozy romance readers. While the overall story is nothing groundbreaking for the genre, the novel’s plot mechanism of ex’s artistically working together on a personal interest piece involving the meaning of love is an excellent premise. Unfortunately, despite having a great foundation and numerous interesting storylines to work off of, I found Love In Focus to repeatedly disappoint at every opportunity, the overall execution being sub-par and quite dull to read. One of the most intriguing elements of Love In Focus is its focal plot mechanism, the photojournalism project “Modern Love In Focus”, featuring six couples of different ages and backgrounds sharing what love means to them. Some couples being queer, some interracial, spread across young, mid-age and senior couples, quantifying and reflecting on the different meanings and interpretations of love is a great concept. In addition to having a compelling reason to unexpectedly reunite college ex’s Gemma and Celeste, the novel’s other highlight is the story’s setting in the romantic and misty (or not depending who you ask) San Francisco as…