Whoops, sorry this is late everyone! Big milestone birthday this month, so I’ve been busy with a pretty wild celebration (said celebration involved exploring several miles of natural caverns, and reading in front of a fire every night. It’s how we roll.) I read at least a dozen excellent books from 2022, far too many to include all of them in one post, so really quick, here are my favorite three.
Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky Book #2) – Rebecca Roanhorse
The world of Meridian keeps expanding further and further outward, showing us more and more of the magic, and history, and incredibly complicated politics that drive Roanhorse’s fantasy pre-Columbian American series. All of the characters are fighting to survive the fallout from the massacre at the end of book 1, a disruptive event that changed everyone’s allegiances and also left the sun permanently stuck behind the moon. I’m looking forward to seeing Book 2’s betrayals and romances work their way into Book 3, but I’m also kind of hoping for a buddy adventure between the zero-fucks-to-give Xiala and the out-of-work assassin-priest Iktan.
Nona The Ninth (The Locked Tomb Series Book 3) – Tamsyn Muir
Little Nona – with her trendy t-shirts and her unfailing love of dogs and swimming and well, everything – was such an odd character that Tamsyn Muir derailed an entire trilogy in order to write an entire novel based around her. And it was totally worth it. 99% of this installment of the Necromancers In Space series is grounded on just two planets, and it’s somehow become even more alien and surreal and just mindblowingly weird. The plot is convoluted enough to be baffling sometimes; reading this series is like running downhill at top speed, always in danger of faceplanting but still able to yell “Holy cow that’s cool!” every chapter. I’m not sure how a series with walking corpses and the history of the universe told in a dream can also have true friendship and touching romance, but Muir manages it every time, and I think Book 4 is going to be absolutely wild.
The Golden Enclaves (Scholomance Book 3) – Naomi Novik
The final book of the Scholomance trilogy is out, and it’s everything I wanted. Saving every student and sealing off the Scholomance didn’t even come close to solving El’s problems. The reader finally gets to see more of the wider world and the different Enclaves as El and her friends travel from continent to continent, trying to figure out who’s causing the collapse of Enclaves (and the deaths of pretty much everyone inside) and to find some way to break back inside the Scholomance and put an end to what’s most definitely a fate worse than death for El’s boyfriend (maybe?) Orion. Along the way El doesn’t just discover the breathtakingly horrible magic that’s been used by magical society, she also finds out once and for all that her grandmother’s prediction – “She will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world” – is completely and unarguably true.