Book Reviews

  • Thornhedge

    Thornhedge is a 2023 novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name of Ursula Vernon, published by Tor.com in August of that year. At 128 pages, it is a slim book with an ambitious premise: a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale told entirely from the perspective of the creature who put the princess to…

  • The Hexologists

    The Hexologists, published by Orbit in September 2023, is the first book in a new fantasy mystery series by Josiah Bancroft, an American author who made his name with the self-published debut Senlin Ascends before finding a wider audience through Orbit Books. Where the Books of Babel quartet was disorienting and epic in scale, The…

  • Service Model

    Adrian Tchaikovsky published Service Model in June 2024 through Tordotcom, and it arrives knowing exactly what it wants to be: a dark comedy about a robotic valet who murders his master and then wanders through the ruins of human civilization, trying to get his malfunction diagnosed. The premise sounds comic, and it is, but Tchaikovsky…

  • Starter Villain

    John Scalzi has built a career on science fiction that moves fast, treats its readers as intelligent, and makes serious arguments inside a package that is easy to enjoy at the beach. Starter Villain, published by Tor Books in September 2023, is one of his sharpest works in years. The novel follows Charlie Fitzer, a…

  • The Saint of Bright Doors

    When Vajra Chandrasekera’s debut novel arrived from Tordotcom in July 2023, it carried the unmistakable weight of a writer working at full capacity, someone who had spent years thinking hard about what a fantasy novel could do with the materials of religion, power, and inherited fate. “The Saint of Bright Doors” is set in the…

  • Never Let Me Go

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, is a novel that disguises itself as a quiet English boarding school story before slowly revealing something far more unsettling. Set in an alternate version of late-twentieth-century England, it follows Kathy H., a thirty-one-year-old “carer” who looks back on her years at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic…

  • Some Desperate Glory

    When “Some Desperate Glory” won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2024, it confirmed what readers had been saying since its April 2023 release: Emily Tesh had written one of the most politically serious and emotionally demanding debut novels in recent science fiction. Tesh is not a new voice in the genre; her novellas…

  • Legends & Lattes

    Viv has been an adventurer for most of her life, and she is tired. At the start of Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes, Travis Baldree’s debut novel, this orc warrior arrives in Thune, a mid-sized city that doesn’t know her name or owe her anything, and sets about doing…

  • The Left Hand of Darkness

    Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is Ursula K. Le Guin’s fifth novel and the one that established her as a major literary force in science fiction. It takes place on Gethen, a planet locked in permanent winter, where Le Guin runs a thought experiment that still feels radical more than fifty years…