The Magician King is the sequel to Lev Grossman’s New York Times bestselling novel The Magicians, which was recently optioned by Fox as a television series. Lev Grossman also won this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, so it seems to be a pretty good year for him. Since this is a direct sequel, there will be spoilers for The Magicians in this review. If you do not want to be spoiled, do not read the rest […]

All Men of Genius is a debut novel by Lev AC Rosen. It’s a steampunk story set in England that draws inspiration from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Violet Adams is a mechanical genius of extraordinary talent. Unfortunately, she’s also not allowed into Illyria, the world’s best college for the sciences, which only admits men as students. When Violet’s father is away for a year to go to a series of conferences in […]

The Dread Hammer is the first fantasy book by Trey Sheils, who has written more books as science fiction writer Linda Nagata. Linda Nagata has won the Locus Award for Best Science First Novel for The Bohr Maker and the Nebula Award for Best Novella for Goddesses. When Ketty’s father decides she is to marry an old man who has been married twice already, she runs away and desperately prays to the Dread Hammer for help when these two men […]

The Cloud Roads is the first book in the Books of Raksura series by Martha Wells, author of the Nebula nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer. The second volume, The Serpent Sea, is scheduled for release in January 2012. Thanks to a brief Twitter conversation with Martha Wells, I discovered that she is working a third book even though it hasn’t been purchased by the publisher yet. When Moon was very young, his mother and siblings were killed, leaving […]

The Demon King is the first book in the Seven Realms series by Cinda Williams Chima.  It is followed by The Exiled Queen, and the third book The Gray Wolf Throne was just released last month. The Crimson Crown, the fourth and final book in the series, is scheduled for release in fall 2012. Han used to be a very successful leader of a street gang known as “Cuffs” for his silver armbands, which he cannot remove and has had […]

Hard Spell is the first book in a new series by Justin Gustainis, the Occult Crimes Unit Investigation series.  There is a second book in this urban fantasy series in progress, Evil Dark. The supernaturals (or “supes” for short) were not a regular occurrence in the United States until after World War II. When the American soldiers came back from fighting overseas, many of them returned as vampires or werewolves and the supernatural started to become more widespread in America. […]