I twisted myself about like the twisted ones… The timing couldn’t have been better. On the same week that North Carolina finally gets some real fall weather (ie: the temperature dropped below 90 degrees), NC resident T. Kingfisher (also know as Ursula Vernon) released a brand new book, The Twisted Ones. This is her first
Someone had to bring back the rains, and apparently it was going to have to be him. All towns have a little magic somewhere, but the luckiest ones have their own mage. A mage is handy to have around to deal with small problems like poison ivy, or gremlins in the mill. It’s been years
Memorial Day weekend is the perfect time to sit back, relax, and finish reading one of the longer novels I’ve got in my to-be-read pile. …so of course I decided to skip that plan and read a bunch of short stories instead. Click the jump for a look at this year’s Hugo Award nominees for
Middle-aged Halla has just inherited her great-uncle’s entire fortune, and now she has to seek legal help to defend her inheritance from her in-laws, who are contesting the will. And if you don’t think that’s enough peril to set a fantasy story around, then you haven’t met Halla’s in-laws. Deciding that suicide is the least-worst
2018 was a year that produced a staggering number of excellent books. Some of them were by my usual favorite authors, and some were by authors I only recently discovered. The good news is that I always had plenty to choose from whenever I needed something new to read. The bad news is that there
I adore short stories; it’s my favorite medium. A really good short story can convey an entire world and the backstory of the characters in the shortest amount of space, and make you care about all of it. This year’s Hugo Nominees are all excellent examples, while being as different from each other as possible. Click
“…I don’t think anyone knows how to turn the wonder-engine off.” The second book of The Clocktaur War series finds the characters right where we left them at the end of Book 1: still trying to find the source of the monstrous clocktaurs that have been rampaging across the countryside. The little team consisting of
I actually read this book right after Ursula Vernon won the Hugo for her story “The Tomato Thief” but I hadn’t had a chance to review it (“hadn’t had a chance” should be read as “didn’t get organized and stop procrastinating long enough” but I think most people assumed that was the case.) I didn’t
Once again I’m running into the problem that readers love to have: too many fantastic books from last year to fit into a short top-three list. Click the jump for a list of the ten best (and by “best” I mean “favorite”) from 2017.