Empire of Shadows by Alicia Wanstall-Burke
A. M. Justice
Toxic mother-daughter relationships are uncommon in fantasy. All too often, mothers are already dead on page one, or if Mama lives, she’s warm and nurturing. Even Cersei Lannister dotes on…
A. M. Justice
Quenby Olson Interview – Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons
A little more than a month ago, I reviewed Quenby Olson’s Regency-era fantasy, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons on this site. In the…
Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons by Quenby Olson
I loved this book. I loved this book. I loved this book! I went back over the reviews I’ve written for Fantasy-Faction and found I’ve used love to describe aspects…
The Green Knight – Movie Review
Growing up, we’re taught to always be kind and tell the truth, but as adults, are any of us truly virtuous? We walk past the panhandler with a muttered “sorry,”…
Horns of the Hunter by Frank Dorrian
Great books sometimes have unlikeable protagonists. Take Madame Bovary, for example. I have to give props to Gustave Flaubert for crafting such a beautifully brutal examination of shallow, status-chasing jackasses…
Glass Rhapsody by Sarah Chorn
There are words you know and use all the time, but you’ve never thought about their actual dictionary definitions. Rhapsody was one of those words for me. I frequently waxed…
In Solitude’s Shadow by David Green
A while back on the Fantasy-Faction Facebook group, I posted a question asking people to name books with endings that were so good they raised the overall rating of the…
Fate of Madness by Jesse Teller
In the 1990s and 2000s, my reading tastes shifted from fantasy to historical fiction, and consequently I not only didn’t read but hadn’t even heard of authors like Steven Erickson…
She Dreams in Blood by Michael R. Fletcher
First person narratives don’t naturally jive with me. Those in present tense bring to mind loquacious toddlers who narrate their existence to doting parents, and the ones in past tense…
The Lost War by Justin Lee Anderson – SPFBO #6 Finals Review
Anderson does a masterful job weaving a fast-paced adventure—including harrowing action scenes involving lots of monsters and zombies—into a fascinating backdrop involving economic ruin, misinformation, nativism, and stigma.
Voice of War by Zack Argyle – SPFBO #6 Finals Review
While preparing for the birth of his first child, Chrys Valerian is tasked with uncovering the group responsible for a series of missing threadweavers—those able to see and manipulate threadlight.…
Scott Kaelen Interview – The Nameless and the Fallen
Scott Kaelen’s debut novel, The Blighted City, was a semifinalist in the Fourth Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off (SPFBO4), and one of my favorite novels to emerge from that annual fantasy…