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 be used for their square’s hard mode. Most of the time, this was easier than a hard mode challenge (goblin antagonists, for instance, are much easier to find than goblin protagonists). But the theme did require me to specifically find a pandemic novel, a book from the Lovecraft mythos, and a book set in a secondary world small town (a task so difficult I can only assume the Bingo overlords just mixed up hard and regular mode on that square). 

As always, it was a lot of fun. It was a little bit difficult using the Bingo recommendation threads, because someone failing to specify hard mode does not imply that a book isn’t actually hard mode, but compared to my Time Warp Bingo card from last year, this was a much lighter organizational challenge. 

Highlights from this card include The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden, Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, and a selection of Five Short Stories by Thomas Ha. And there are a couple more highlights that I’m saving for my unthemed card, so keep an eye out for those in the coming spring (looking at you, The Reformatory). 

Let’s have a look at the full card! Links to go full reviews. 

 

First in a Series: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

• Other 2024 Squares: Book Club, Author of Color, Prologues and Epilogues. 

• Mini-review: This cozy mystery and sapphic romance builds a wonderfully evocative Jovian setting and gestures at some fascinating themes, but the character voices read a bit too similar, and both the mystery and romance are good-but-not-great. 

• Rating: 14/20. 

Alliterative Title: The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

• Other 2024 Squares: Dreams, Bards, Author of Color, Published in 2024, Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: Another entry in the Singing Hills Cycle is engaging as always and includes some deeply Gothic stylings, though with more focus on the lead’s tale than the usual collection of stories.

• Rating: 16/20. 

Under the Surface: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

• Other 2024 Squares: Space Opera (hard mode), Reference Materials, Book Club. 

• Mini-review: Tesh’s bingeable prose and some absolutely tremendous character work make this an excellent read, though a tendency to take the easy way out of difficult moral quandaries keep it from hitting the full heights of its potential. 

• Rating: 17/20. 

Criminals: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

• Other 2024 Squares: Book Club.

• Mini-review: This is clearly meant to be silly and entertaining, with tons of shoutouts to popular tropes and some satisfying comeuppance for the villains. After some early meandering, it largely hits that goal, as long as you don’t spend much time thinking about it. 

• Rating: 13/20. 

Dreams: Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

• Other 2024 Squares: Character with a Disability (hard mode), First in a Series, Under the Surface, Published in 2024, Reference Materials. 

• Mini-review: An Italian-inspired, low-magic political fantasy with backstabbing and scheming aplenty. This feels like it would’ve been an enormous hit 10 or 15 years ago, but it’s still an excellent example of the style. 

• Rating: 17/20. 

Entitled Animals: Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

• Other 2024 Squares: Author of Color (hard mode), Published in 2024 (hard mode), Multi-POV, Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: A fascinating, post-apocalyptic road trip through an America with nary a white person left oversimplifies a number of story elements, but in a way that allows it to explore Black healing and its potential costs. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Bards: The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

• Other 2024 Squares: Survival (hard mode), Character with a Disability (hard mode), Published in 2024, Dreams. 

• Mini-review: Expertly blends the WWI setting with the Faelike bargains of its speculative element to explore family and loss, trauma, grief, and memory. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Prologues and Epilogues: The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

• Other 2024 Squares: Dreams (hard mode), Indie Publisher (hard mode), Published in 2024 (hard mode), Eldritch (hard mode), Criminals, Book Club, Reference Materials. 

• Mini-review: In many ways the thematic counterpart to Some Desperate Glory, this feels more real and grounded in its moral elements but not quite as sharp in its character study. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Self/Indie-Published: Small Gods of Calamity by Sam Kyung Yoo. 

• Other 2024 Squares: Published in 2024 (hard mode), Author of Color (hard mode), Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: Part police procedural, partly character-driven exploration of grief and trauma, this does some excellent thematic work but feels a bit like two stories awkwardly smashed into a single book. 

• Rating: 13/20. 

Romantasy: A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas

• Other 2024 Squares: Dreams, Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: After a tepid, inconsistent start to the wildly popular Romantasy series, the second installment finds its footing, delivering a readable and exciting story with loads of sexual tension, albeit with a few too many unforced mistakes by characters who should know better. 

• Rating: 14/20. 

Dark Academia: The Two Doctors Górski by Issac Fellman

• Other 2024 Squares: Character with a Disability (hard mode), Prologues and Epilogues. 

• Mini-review: A tremendous character-driven study of abuse in academia, albeit with a bit of a haphazard plot.

• Rating: 16/20. 

Multi-POV: Translation State by Ann Leckie

• Other 2024 Squares: Space Opera (hard mode), Book Club

• Mini-review: The plot is a bit too straightforward for my taste, but it’s well-paced and exciting, and some delightfully strange aliens make this well worth the read 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Published in 2024: Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares

• Other 2024 Squares: Character with a Disability (hard mode), Dreams, Prologues and Epilogues, Multi-POV. 

• Mini-review: A solid-but-unexceptional thriller plot built on a tremendously disorienting dive into fragmented memories of a failed relationship—read this one for the weird memory shenanigans and interpersonal depth. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Character with a Disability: The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee

• Other 2024 Squares: First in a Series, Published in 2024, Author of Color. 

• Mini-review: The first in a new novella series is an anti-colonial quest story with a pair of secondary characters with lots of trauma to work through. And also with dragons.

• Rating: 14/20. 

Published in the 1990s: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

• Other 2024 Squares: Survival (hard mode), Under the Surface. 

• Mini-review: A post-apocalyptic memoir that’s short on answers but long on exploration and musing about the nature of human experience. A cult classic for a reason. 

• Rating: 16/20. 

Orcs, Trolls, and Goblins: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

• Other 2024 Squares: Published in 2024, Reference Materials, Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: A grim war story with a bit of family drama thrown in. Well told, though not my preferred subgenre. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Space Opera: The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey

• Other 2024 Squares: Survival (hard mode), Multi-POV (hard mode), First in a Series, Dreams, Published in 2024, Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: A slow build with lots of academic politics and a few characters that run together, eventually opening onto a gripping plot about proving to some fantastically alien aliens that humanity is worth keeping around 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Author of Color: One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun

• Other 2024 Squares: Indie Publisher, Reference Materials. 

• Mini-review: Very much a litfic novella, with snapshots into the lives of two people who work in a building scheduled for demolition, plus a romantic subplot and some not-sure-if-it’s-real fantasy elements. More engaging in the parts than in the whole. 

• Rating: 13/20.

Survival: We Are All Ghosts in the Forest by Lorraine Wilson

• Other 2024 Squares: Set in a Small Town (hard mode), Dreams, Published in 2024, Author of Color. 

• Mini-review: A lovely, quiet tale of an herbalist trying to survive a tech apocalypse in the midst of small-town prejudice builds to a grand magical thriller that never grabs me quite so much as it did in the quieter moments. 

• Rating: 14/20.

Judge a Book by Its Cover: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• Other 2024 Squares: Survival (hard mode), Dreams, Published in 2024, Character with a Disability, Criminals, Reference Materials. 

• Mini-review: The French Revolution on a prison planet populated by VanderMeer-style weird fauna. If that sounds like your thing, you’ll probably enjoy it, though I’ve seen Tchaivkosky’s cynical narrators a couple too many times at this point. 

• Rating: 16/20.

Set in a Small Town: Lifelode by Jo Walton

• Other 2024 Squares: Multi-POV, Character with a Disability. 

• Mini-review: A wonderfully weird and ambitious family drama in a world where time flows differently as you travel East and West. Becomes a bit more action-heavy toward the end and needs a bit more time to satisfyingly tie up the subplots, but it’s worth reading for all the unconventional things it tries. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Five Short Stories: Cretins, Grottmata, Alabama Circus Punk, The Sort, and Behind the Gilded Door by Thomas Ha. 

• Other 2024 Squares: Wait for 2025 when Ha’s first collection comes out. 

• Mini-review: Thomas Ha is one of the best short story writers in the genre right now, with particular skill at quietly building tension and at using speculative premises to reflect on everyday phenomena. My favorites here are Cretins and Grottmata, but all five are good. 

• Rating: 18/20. 

Eldritch Creatures: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

• Other 2024 Squares: Under the Surface, Dreams, Reference Materials. 

• Mini-review: I didn’t realize until afterwards that this was a retelling, and perhaps I’d have gotten more out of it had I read the original. I found a lot to like in the prose and handling of the themes, but a bit too much repetitiveness in the quest plot. 

• Rating: 15/20. 

Reference Materials: Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

• Other 2024 Squares: Eldritch (hard mode), Dreams

• Mini-review: Despite being philosophical and intensely thematic, this is a surprisingly readable character study, with lots to say on power imbalances in relationships and meditations on divine hiddenness. 

• Rating: 18/20.

Book Club: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

• Other 2024 Squares: Romantasy (hard mode), Goblins Orcs and Trolls, Indie Published. 

• Mini-review: An arrogant, genre-aware nerd gets portal fantasy’d to a school that seems to run on magic school tropes (and a few regular school tropes). He proceeds to snark unceasingly and eventually learns to treat other humans like people. The narrative voice is so strong here that you’ll know in two pages whether you’ll love it or hate it. 

• Rating: 15/20.