Each year since my pandemic-fueled reading binge, I’ve completed two full cards for the r/Fantasy Bingo challenge: one themed card and one regular card. This year, my entire theme is being regular—each square has an optional “hard mode” to give the reader an extra challenge, and I’ve filled an entire card with books that cannot… Continue reading Not-So-Hard: My 2024 Fantasy Bingo Card
I hadn’t previously read any Nathan Tavares, but I’m always curious about books that provoke especially strong reactions, and a Redditor hyping up Welcome to Forever as the book of the year nudged me to look further into it. And between a premise that included plenty of weird memory stuff and an extremely messy interpersonal… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares
Earlier this year, someone from the best of my many book clubs read I Who Have Never Known Men and was totally wowed, recommending it as a masterpiece that’s equally philosophical and character-driven. At that point, it wasn’t a question of whether I would read it, just a question of when. And this fall the… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
This is the same every month. I read some genre magazines, I talk about them. Let’s go. Clarkesworld My favorite genre magazine over the last several years has been Clarkesworld, which generally mixes experimental or boundary-pushing sci-fi with well-executed takes on classic premises. The former is unsurprisingly more boom-or-bust, but I regularly find favorites in… Continue reading Tar Vol Reads a Magazine (or Two): Reviews of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus (November 2024)
Ever since reading the tremendous “Strange Waters” a few years back, I’ve been eager to get to more of Samantha Mills. So when seemingly half of my Short Fiction Book Club friends were recommending her debut novel The Wings Upon Her Back, it was not a matter of if I would read it, but when. … Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills
I read A Court of Thorns and Roses earlier this year to see what all the hype was about. It really wasn’t good. But then I was told that I had actually not seen what all the hype was about, because really it’s the second book in the series–A Court of Mist and Fury–that set… Continue reading Fantasy Series Review: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
I’ve been traveling, so my October roundup is extremely late! In part because of the travel, it’s bit a little bit of a light month with novels, but I’ve reviewed some books I’m extremely excited about, and I’ve read some short fiction that’s going pretty high on my annual favorites list. Plus SPSFC is in… Continue reading October 2024 Round-up and Short Fiction Miscellany
This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. We Are All Ghosts in the Forest will be released on November 7, 2024. I had never heard of Lorraine Wilson before seeing We Are All Ghosts in the Forest pop up on NetGalley,… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: We Are All Ghosts in the Forest by Lorraine Wilson
Welcome to the second month of the new feature in which I dip into various magazines for a couple stories in a given issue. I can’t really call them magazine reviews, since I’m only reading a small portion of the magazines in question, but I also want to give the venues a little bit more… Continue reading Tar Vol’s Magazine Minis: Reckoning 8, Uncanny #60, and Asimov’s (November/December 2024)
I’ve been hearing about Jo Walton for a while, but the place I chose to start was an odd one. Regular readers of the blog will be unsurprised to hear that it had a lot to do with Bingo. I’ve been working on a “Not So Hard” theme where I fill each square with a… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Lifelode by Jo Walton
