Katherine Addison – The Goblin Emperor

I’ve been saving this to read for years because people I trust described it as a warm hug of a book, which seemed like something I might need to have in reserve. And that’s kind of true, and kind of not? Because while Maia, our viewpoint character, is trying to navigate a complex environment about

Skye Kilaen – Glorious Day

“Glorious Day” takes some fairy-tale-ish elements – a wicked king and a scheming courtier, an innocent (at least in some ways) princess, a noble-hearted guard – adds a lot of realistic emotional complexity, gives it a futuristic veneer, queers it, and remixes it all into an unusual, slow burn FF romance (with just a dash

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Gods of Jade and Shadow

Both the 1920’s Mexican setting and the underpinning of Mayan myth set “Gods of Jade and Shadow” apart from the vast majority of fantasy fiction; the combination lends this novel firmly in “not like anything else I’ve ever read” territory. Even when the bones of the plot feel (appropriately!) familiar, the way it unfolds is

Jennifer Weiner: The Guy Not Taken

I liked this short story collection much better than “Good in Bed.”

The Girl Who Would Be King

The Girl Who Would be King uses alternating first-person narration to tell the stories of two young women who discover that they have unusual abilities, their struggles to understand and adapt to them, and the conflict those struggles eventually draw them into. Along the way Bonnie and Lola become, more or less, a superhero and

Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl

I had a very mixed response to Gone Girl, and a decidedly see-saw reading experience. It features two strong and very distinct authorial voices, both rendered with considerable verve, and these initially drew me in. But I quickly grew impatient with long lags between broad hints (not nearly subtle enough to be called foreshadows) and

Catherynne Valente: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

I loved this book so much that weeks later I’m still struggling to express my reactions coherently. Valente explicitly draws on the works of Barrie, Baum, Carroll, Lewis, and the folk tale tradition as represented by the Grimms and Andrew Lang’s compendia. It has a dash of post-modern self-referential awareness of its own narrative (but

Victor Gischler: Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse may have been partly the victim of excessive expectations from me: I love the title, and it had extravagant blurbs from authors I admire. But it left me cold. Aside from the conceit hinted at in the title — that a strip-club franchise could become the nucleus of a new

Heather Donahue: Growgirl

When I heard of this book, it sounded like the real-life counterpart of Weeds: Donahue, an actress in career free-fall after a successful movie failed to result in a viable career, decides that raising pot sounds like a viable make-ends-meet option, and makes other highly questionable choices; some whacky and some racy stuff ensues. In

Lizabeth Zindel: A Girl, A Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills

Holly has problems. Her mom died, and her dad has taken up with her mom’s sister, Claudia, which is pretty oogy. Something that may or may not be her mom’s ghost is crying out for vengeance, and Holly doesn’t know whether to trust it or not. Everyone in Holly’s life has names that start with