My hands were very bad this month, and there was awfulness wherein my half-sibs needed me, so I got much less review-writing done than I wanted. I’ve been exhausted. But in and around everything else, I read so many incredible books! Plus, I’m finally on migraine preventatives, so hopefully the daily migraines will stop or at least ease up soon. Fingers crossed!
ARCs Received
Almost all of my arcs this month were books already on my Unmissable list, and yes I’m feeling TRULY spoiled!!!
An Edge Sharp Enough – science fantasy set in the aftermath of an industrial revolution, after the invention of an indestructible metal! Since being approved for this one the release date’s been pushed back to next year – haven’t seen that happen before!
The Demon Star – another science fantasy, this one claiming to have ‘The otherworldly religious conflict of Dune, the cosmic strangeness of Gideon the Ninth, and the heart-pounding action of Red Rising‘. Promises, promises!
The Dragon Has Some Complaints – here a disabled three-headed dragon (who used to have four heads) sneaks into dragon-rider school to wreak vengeance on humans. Only he gets adopted by a sweetheart who Believes In Him. Oops. Shenanigans ensue!
The Black Parade – queer sci fi where the only cure to a terrible plague is one poor guy’s blood – but he’s not on the run, he’s giving it out for free, which is an interesting change from the usual set-up!
A Villain’s Hope – an Unmissable which I can confirm already justified its spot, because I read it and it’s epic. Sequel to last year’s King’s Trust, but so much twistier with much, much higher stakes! (You can read my review here if you so wish.)
Bodies of Magic – it’s the newest from Freya Marske!!! Do I even need to pitch it? At this point she’s an auto-buy author for me!
The Lost Book of Lancelot – queer Lancelot! Who is not a knight I’ve particularly cared about before, but hopefully this book will change that.
Vile Lady Villains – this was on my Unmissable list, but alas, this was a DNF for me. Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth are thrown together and eventually become girlfriends, and yes, I too am stunned it didn’t work for me!
A Viper Among Kings – I’ve been pining for this one since the publishing deal was announced! Assassins, polyamory, sentient magic – eee, I need this to be as excellent as it sounds!
The Shape of Monsters – IT’S THE SEQUEL TO MERCY MAKERS AND NO I HAVEN’T STOPPED SCREAMING ABOUT IT SINCE IT LANDED ON MY EREADER!
The Felicity Complex – new august clarke?! See above re: SO MUCH (DELIGHTED) SCREAMING!
Carrying – horror where a stealth trans woman, playing Perfect Housewife, mysteriously ends up pregnant? Oh HELLS yes, gimme!
Read
30 books!!! I haven’t read that many books in a month since July twenty twenty-four. !!! Gods I hope this is a trend that continues!
And March was PACKED with stunning reads – Villain’s Hope was a brilliant sequel to a book I adored; Buffalo Is the New Buffalo is an incredible, really clever collection full of brilliant footnotes; Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders have cemented Ada Palmer as an auto-buy author because OH MY GODS WOW; Bereket was unputdownably twisty and I devoured it; The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale was an unmitigated delight from start to finish; I didn’t love Felicity Complex for personal taste reasons but it’s objectively phenomenal; Seasons of Glass and Iron was, as expected, magnificent; and The Halls of the Dead was the queer, poly take on necromancy I didn’t know I’d been craving – sheer perfection!
Notable rereads – King’s Trust, naturally, to prepare for Villain’s Hope; Mountain of Kept Memory is a brilliant science fantasy I don’t think I appreciated fully the first time around; and obviously I had to reread Mercy Makers so I could dive in to Shape of Monsters next! I reread Hench for the same reason; I have an arc of the sequel and now I’m ready for it! Plus, I’m reading Tremontaine to my partner as a bedtime book, and that definitely counts as a reread too (for me if not for him!)
- BIPOC Authors: 6
- 2026 Releases: 9
- Indie: 17
- Rereads: 9
- Books From Authors New-to-Me-This-Year: 8
- Trans Rights Readathon: 6
- 26 Books For 2026: 2
- Books Going on My Best-of-Year Lists: A Villain’s Hope, Too Like the Lightning and sequels, Halls of the Dead. Very likely Buffalo Is the New Buffalo and Seasons of Glass and Iron also!
DNFed
I can see all of these being enjoyed by the right reader – well, no, not Secret Commonwealth actually, I do think that’s just bad and I have no idea why Pullman decided to write a sequel trilogy if this is what he was going to do with it. But the rest! The rest will all be fun for the right reader, who is most definitely not me. (Sink or Burn wasn’t in yesterday’s DNF roundup because I gave up on it today; I’ll add it later!)
Reviewed
I have so many reviews I need to write, but bad hands + brainfog meant not much writing this month. Sigh. Pleased with the ones I got written, though! (My review for What We Are Seeking goes live next week.)
Next Up
Some familiar covers here – how can I be dying to get to Air Logic, Machine and Fire Born of Exile, and yet keep failing so hard at getting to them??? Bizarre. A mystery. But there are some new releases from today that I’m eager to pick up – Quarter Queen is about Marie Laveau and her daughter, and Widow’s Charm and Geomagician both look sweet and soft, which I find myself craving just now.
ARCs Outstanding
Unmissable SFF Updates
Some pub date changes (Goblin Crown got pushed back to September, excuse my wailing!) and a few additions (one very belated, how did I forget to add Breath and Bone ages ago?!) Meaning this year’s list is now 76 books long! Plus LOTS of cover reveals!
How did my predictions/anticipated reads for March go? I declared six books Unmissable for this month, and–
- two were five-star reads (Seasons of Glass and Iron and Villain’s Hope)
- one I already knew was a five-star read because I read it previously (Deep Black)
- three I DNFed (Black as Diamond, Hell’s Heart and Ruiner)
Not great – only two worth-reading books I hadn’t read before this year! Pfft.
Misc
Thanks to Imyril’s reminder that Wyrd & Wonder is on the horizon, I’ve been brainstorming and starting posts for it. This year’s theme is the moon, so clearly a werewolf rec list is mandatory – but so is one featuring settings with multiple moons, because who doesn’t love those???
The r/Fantasy book bingo wrapped up this month, and for once I managed a write-up!
The last two weeks of March were this year’s Trans Rights Readathon, for which I had a long reading list to choose from. I managed to read 5 books by trans authors, which is pretty respectable I think.
And last but not least, a rec list for Trans Day of Visibility! This time focussing on openly trans and nonbinary authors, rather than protagonists.
Around the Bookish Internet
CSE Cooney shared Matthew Kressel’s Espie Droger Dreams of War, a short story published through Lightspeed (free to read at the link). I want to print it out and hand it to people on the street like a religious pamphlet, that’s how much I think it should be mandatory reading!
A number of indie trans horror books are free to download until 11:59PM CST today, so when this post goes live you should still have time to nab them!
Looking Forward
So many books tobe excited about in April! A Dance of Burning Blades comes out in the UK, and yes ofc I’ve already arranged to get a copy, I can’t wait till it releases in the US in August; The Language of Liars is about learning alien languages and also going undercover as an alien, I think? The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is about a sentient roomba and sounds adorable, whereas Witch Queen Rising features someone known as the Tick Witch, as in the horrible bugs that drink your blood. First Mage on the Moon has a wheelchair user working to get man on the moon in a world of wizards, and Mystery of the Bitten Peach is the newest Neon Hemlock novella, about someone who can magically jump between all the Chinatowns of the would. Man Muse Monster is a queer horror featuring one family’s shapeshifting artistic muse, and Flightless is a queer heist story in a world with three sentient species living alongside each other – plus revolution and flight!
Farewell March! Here’s wishing us all an ambrosial April!
I’ve added so many books to my reading list after discovering your blog, and that’s one of the biggest compliments I can give! I’m particularly eager for Canon, Opal and Oestre, Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous, The Bloodweaver, and The Demon Star. I’m also curious about God’s Scar and Chai and Charmcraft as well.
A question about Hench [and by extension Villain]: how dark is it, exactly? I’m intrigued by the premise, but the huge content warnings have been making me extra cautious. [I bought Hench without reading the content warnings. Not making that mistake again.]
That is INDEED an immense compliment, I am flattered and delighted! I’m reading Opal and Oestre at the moment, but should have reviews for all those titles eventually. God’s Scar and Chai and Charmcraft are both high on my to-read-next, since their due dates are soonish, so hopefully I’ll be sharing my thoughts about them in the next few weeks. Fingers crossed!
I’m not sure, from what you’ve said, if you’ve actually read Hench yet or not? I haven’t read Villain yet, so I can’t speak to how dark it is, but Hench is reasonably dark. It’s not graphic in terms of gore or injury or anything, but the MC is permanently disabled by an unfair injury, and at one point she’s taken to be lobotomised. Early on a villain mind-controls a kid into cutting off his finger. The mc and her villain employer set up assaults and kidnappings. Various npcs are horrifically injured or murdered. The final showdown, what happens to the ultimate antagonist is pretty horrific – he’s a terrible person but I find it hard to believe anyone deserves THAT. I think the tone and the way it’s written makes it not grimdark, but there’s no question what’s actually happening is pretty awful by most normal standards!
Sometimes I encounter books that are so weird, I have to put them all together on my reading list regardless of genre, into the “Wonderful Weirdness” category. Canon definitely fits.
Yikes! All of that sounds way too much for me.
I do have a couple other superhero books on my list [We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen, and the Sidekick Squad series by C. B. Lee], but it’s so hard to find queer superhero books. Dreadnought by April Daniels was so bleak and had so much misogyny mixed with bizarre gender essentialism, and so infuriatingly written, it almost ruined my interest in superheroes completely. So now I’ve been a bit hesitant to even search for new ones.
Um, PLEASE tell me more about your Wonderful Weirdness category! Especially if Canon is emblematic of what’s on there!
The Sidekick series is on my tbr too, I’ve heard such great things. But generally I’m not really a superhero fan – the books I’ve tried haven’t really impressed me, bar Hench, which we’ve established is not to your taste! So I don’t think I have any recs…Oh! There’s the Cute Mutants series? Very queer, I’ve only read the first book but I liked it a lot – there’s genre-typical violence but I don’t remember it being dark, just wacky and fun. I reviewed it here if you want to check it out!
Wonderful Weirdness: [not counting Canon]
The Seep by Chana Porter [1]
We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year Old Overlord by Garth Nix
Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings
The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta
The West Passage by Jared Pechacek
The Memory Hunters by Mia Tsai
Dark Reading Matter by Jasper Fforde [3]
Some of these you’ve reviewed already, I think.
Footnotes! Yay!
[1] This is also in the Eldritch Vibes/Cosmic Horror category, so I’m not really sure where to put it until I read it.
[2] Big fan of his books. Nothing he’s written since the Old Kingdom trilogy has hit nearly in the same way, but I do love how inventive he is.
[3] It’s been 14 years [!!!] since the previous book in the Thursday Next series, and now the last book is finally coming out this fall. I don’t know how to feel about it. Too many feelings. I’m planning a re-read at the start of October.
I think I prefer superhero parodies that are also allowed to be genuine, rather than superheroes played straight, pun intended. Megamind and The Incredibles are two of my favourite movies.
Cute Mutants looks like a ton of fun! But they’re not on Kobo. Much sadness.
I have indeed read several of these already! West Passage I reviewed (and adored), but I haven’t managed reviews for Seep or Mad Sisters of Esi. Loved both though!
Meet Me at the Crossroads and Memory Hunters I dnfed – the former wasn’t weird enough for me XD Hopefully you’ll enjoy it more!
I don’t remember Cosmic Horror vibes from Seep, but I do think my standards for things like that are a bit wonky, so take that with a pinch of salt I guess?
I’ve never managed to get past the first Thursday Next book, though I keep trying because I love the set-up so much. But getting the final book after so long…! All the Song of Ice and Fire fans must be terribly jealous.
Damn, I didn’t realise Cute Mutants wasn’t on Kobo! (I only recently switched to buying from Kobo.) I’d say reach out to the author – lots of self-pubbed authors will let you buy direct, or work something out – but I don’t think they’re easy to get a hold of, they’ve been MIA for a few years now :/ So I’m not sure what to suggest, alas. Oh! They do have a patreon – it’s not active any more, but they do have epubs available on some posts. If you can find a Cute Mutants one you could pay to unlock just that one post and download the file…?