Set in Oxford’s magical community a year or so after the end of World War II, this gentle, slowly-unfolding romance features intelligent, good-hearted, skilled and competent people treating others with kindness and respect—a hallmark of Celia Lake’s Albion novels, and the reason I (and her other fans) love them so much.
You know that feeling when the perfect book comes along just when you need it? That was The Reimagining of Thornwood House for me this spring: a book about hope, new beginnings, moving, healing, and finding a home and a place in your new community.
A lovely, warm, cozy sapphic fantasy about kindness, community, and learning to be your true self
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday post takes a look at ten very long books in the fantasy and sci-fi genres.
What a lovely, warm hug of a book! Cozy, heartwarming, and enchanting (but never saccharine or twee), A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping centers around found family, love, acceptance, healing, and the strength of rebuilding yourself after disaster.
I loved The Teller of Small Tales, Julie Leong’s debut novel. It’s a cozy quest fantasy with a found-family vibe, set in a vaguely British renaissance-era world.
Wooing the Witch Queen was an absolute delight, from its sweet, sensitive, traumatized cinnamon-roll hero to its introverted, reclusive, but decidedly not evil heroine.
Nikki Giovanni’s death; New Jersey protects the freedom to read; British authors’ society calls for ghostwriters to be credited; AI creates a ludicrously bad textbook cover; Romantasy has been there all along; Sanderson on writing fantasy; and more article links.
The third book in Mercedes Lackey’s Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, Fortune’s Fool is an enjoyable if eclectic remix of a number of fairy tales. Lackey takes a wide assortment of elements drawn from Russian, eastern and northern European, Japanese, and Middle Eastern folk and fairy tales, and mixes them up, higgledy-piggledy… and it works surprisingly well.
Mary Robinette Kowal makes good use of the historical “year without a summer” in the third book of her Glamourist Histories. As Britain remains locked in winter’s grip, Jane and her husband Vincent are in London to work on a glamour commission for Lord Stratton, an Irish peer. Hearing that her sister Melody is melancholic and realizing there are few marriageable men near home, the Vincents invite Melody to stay with them. Melody’s growing affection for Stratton’s son, Mr. O’Brien, is complicated by Jane’s suspicions of the young man, and by the public’s growing belief that coldmongers are responsible for the unseasonable weather. Meanwhile, Jane and Vincent must contend with his father’s relentless cruelty and ambition, as well as a shadowy plot that threatens O’Brien, the young coldmongers, Jane and Vincent’s very lives, and even the British government itself.
