Just four this month! Maybe that’s a good omen for 2025.
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy
Representation: Brown cast
Published on: 28th January 2025
ISBN: 0316580856
Goodreads
A mage bereft of her powers must find out if she is destined to save the world or destroy it in this glittering debut fantasy perfect for fans of Andrea Stewart, James Islington, and Samantha Shannon.
In the glass city of Amoria, magic is everything. And Naila, student at the city's legendary academy, is running out of time to prove she can control hers. If she fails, she'll be forced into exile, relegated to a life of persecution with the other magicless hollows. Or worse, be consumed by her own power.
When a tragic incident further threatens her place at the Academy, Naila is saved by Haelius Akana, the most powerful living mage. Finding Naila a kindred spirit, Haelius stakes his position at the Academy on teaching her to harness her abilities. But Haelius has many enemies, and they would love nothing more than to see Naila fail. Trapped in the deadly schemes of Amoria's elite, Naila must dig deep to discover the truth of her powers or watch the city she loves descend into civil war.
For there is violence brewing on the wind, and greater powers at work. Ones who could use her powers for good… or destroy everything she's ever known.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
The writing is perfectly lovely, but Outcast Mage seems to be retreading very familiar ground – nothing about this felt very new; in fact, it strongly reminded me of the ‘classic’ fantasies that we saw a lot of in the early 2000s. Obviously, that’s something some readers are going to love about it! Especially because that familiarity comes with a mainly brown-skinned cast with many women, which is definitely not something the classics I’m talking about had a lot of! So this is going to be the best of both, for lots of fantasy fans; a very classical feel, but much more diversity.
I can’t pinpoint why, but seriously, the Black Magician Trilogy vibes are strong with this one.
We have a young mage woman who can’t use her magic; a very powerful mage who is a member of the ruling mage council; a foreign priest who is definitely a spy; a rapidly rising tide of fascism, with more and more mages deciding all their problems are the fault of non-mages; a city inside a giant bubble of violet glass… I found the fascism plotline very heavy-handed, to be honest, and moving faster than I thought believable; and I wasn’t all that interested when our mageling who can’t use magic comes under the wing of a nearly all-powerful sorcerer who wants to teach her. Too many mic-drop reveals were handed to us very casually, which stripped them of the impact they should have had, while a lot of other aspects seemed to be telegraphing Very Loudly where the story was going. Nothing about any of the characters stood out to me; I can’t remember any of their names now. Only the all-powerful sorcerer – I think they used the term ‘wizard’ for the most powerful kind of mage, actually – seemed like a distinct character, and even he felt quite bland.
But the prose is genuinely great; the writing flows along quick and clean, gleaming like clear water. I can see that many people are going to enjoy this a lot, and I don’t blame them. Alas, it’s just not holding my attention at all. But if you yearn for the days you discovered Trudi Canavan and the like, then this might be an excellent book for you.
Genres: Adult, Speculative Fiction
Representation: Disabled Nigerian-American MC
ISBN: 1399622986
Goodreads
The future of storytelling is here.
Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.
In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.
What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.
Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.
This isn’t bad AT ALL: I just can’t stand Zelu’s family. The constant micro-aggressions are just too much for me, however much I adore Zelu herself. The writing is brisk and – I want to say personable and I don’t entirely know what I mean by that? But every character, even the most minor, is fully three-dimensional, vividly alive in a way that feels rare.
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Representation: Minor Black character
PoV: 1st-person, past-tense
Published on: 11th February 2025
ISBN: 0593500237
Goodreads
The third installment in the heartwarming and enchanting Emily Wilde series, about a curmudgeonly scholar of folklore and the fae prince she loves.
Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm—as its queen.
Along with her former academic rival—now fiancé—the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell’s long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare filled with scholarly treasures.
Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal How can an unassuming scholar such as herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in, for Wendell’s murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell’s magic—and Emily’s knowledge of stories—to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Bored out of my MIND. You can’t have stakes this high and keep it cosy, and the attempt at having both clashes badly, rendering Compendium a mess that can’t decide what it wants to be: it doesn’t have the cosy-whimsy-charm of the previous books, and it definitely hasn’t managed to transition or transform into a high-stakes high-tension save-the-realm epic. (Which: nobody wanted that! Literally nobody asked you to suddenly try and turn this into a fate-of-the-realm story. Why couldn’t we just have a novel about Wendell settling in as king and Emily finding her place in the scariest fairy realm?)
But the main problem is how simple and convenient it all is. Why is Emily suddenly saying ‘I somehow knew’ all the time about random magical details she can’t possibly know? Why is every problem and conflict wrapped up neatly in ten minutes or less? Why bother introducing all these mini problems if you’re just going to magic-wand them away? Do you know how hard it is to stay interested when you do that? I’m not even choosing not to care about each new problem, you’re not giving me TIME to care before you’ve fixed it!
Being up close and personal to Fawcett’s Folk is…making it very clear that they’re quite dull, actually. At least the ice fae in book one felt alien and strange; Wendell’s court, despite allegedly being the Courtly Fae of, again, the scariest fae realm to ever fae, are just…humans playing dress-up. And not even interesting dress-up! At LEAST give me fae fashion, for crying out loud, and no, a cloak so soaked in blood it leaves a trail on the floor doesn’t cut it. Dresses made up of water and sunlight and envy! Necklaces studded with mortal dreams instead of jewels! Folk with fur or porcupine quills or wings instead of hair! There’s no strangeness, there’s no beauty, they’re not even scary or monstrous. And don’t get me started on the giant foxes they use instead of horses. HOW DO YOU MAKE GIANT FOXES BORING?
And listen. Listen. I love Emily. Emily is amazing. But chapters and chapters of her being ‘uneasy’ instead of excited and delighted and obsessively trying to Know Everything about the realm she finds herself in is a) disappointing b) exhausting and c) BORING.
I read to 45% and honestly, that was 35% too much. Genuinely made my eyelids heavy.
What’s with all the trilogy-finales disappointing me lately???
Genres: Fantasy, MG
ISBN: B0191X35D0
Goodreads
Once upon a time, a girl was born. It was rather uneventful.
Her parents were happy enough: the mother glad to be done carrying it; the father glad to be done with the mystery of it all. But then one day they realized that their baby, the one they’d named Alice, had no pigment at all. Her hair and skin were white as milk, her heart and bones as soft as silk. Her eyes alone had been spared a spot of color: only just clinging to the faintest shade of honey. It was the kind of child her world could not appreciate.
Ferenwood had been built on color. Bursts of it, swaths of it, depths and breadths of it. Its people were known to be the brightest — modeled after the planets, they’d said — and young Alice was deemed simply too dim, even though she knew she was not.
Once upon a time, a girl was forgot.
Twelve-year-old Alice Alexis Queensmeadow has only three things in the world that matter: Mother, who wouldn’t miss her; triplet brothers, who never knew her; and Father, who always loved her. The day Father disappears from Ferenwood he takes nothing but a ruler with him, so some said he’d gone to measure the sea. Others said the sky. The moon. Maybe he’d learned to fly and had forgotten how to come back down. But it’s been almost six years since then, and Alice is determined to find him. She loves her father even more than she loves adventure, and she’s about to embark on one to find the other. No matter the cost.
It’s a kind of fairytale, a story where magic is a must, adventure is inevitable, and friendship is found in the most unexpected places.
I enjoyed this author’s YA years back, so what with me starting to experiment with MG fantasy, this seemed like a good place to start!
Unfortunately, the child abuse (including physical abuse) is played for laughs here, which is not something I can handle. I might not have been able to deal with it even if it had been taken seriously, but definitely not when it’s treated like a comedy sketch. What.
(When I looked into it, I learned how the ending goes with the abuser and FUCK THAT FOR A GAME OF SOLDIERS.)
The actual meat of the book seems lovely, what I saw of it, but I didn’t sign up for child abuse, wasn’t expecting it/braced for it, and the tone struck me wrong.
Fingers crossed I have more luck with my next MG!
And more luck with February in general, hopefully!
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