March 5, 2020
The Hazel Wood is a part of my 2020 Resolution Project. I have 20 books that qualify as speculative on my shelves that I have yet to read — and that I have owned many for several years. The Hazel Wood, however, is not one of those books. I bought this book only a handful of months ago, although I’ve…
March 3, 2020
I’ve been a fan of Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series for years, and I’ve always enjoyed her take on certain urban fantasy tropes. I was completely satisfied by how the primary series wrapped up, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t jump at the chance to revisit the world and learn more about one of my favorite secondary characters. The Immortal…
March 1, 2020
An Illusion of Thieves (2019) Written by: Cate Glass Genre: Fantasy Adventure Host: Kendra Merritt Discussion Date: 3/27/2020 The Premise: A ragtag crew with forbidden magic must pull off an elaborate heist and stop a civil war in An Illusion of Thieves, a fantasy adventure from Cate Glass. In Cantagna, being a sorcerer is a death sentence. Romy escapes her…
February 28, 2020
Ghost stories and haunted houses are my absolute favorites in horror, so I actively seek them out. But due to the quirks of my brain and the busyness of everyday life, I don’t have the focus to read books of standard or more length. I’ve kept to reading comics, novellas, and short stories for the last decade or so. When…
February 26, 2020
I really loved the characters from the first book in The Tarot Sequence, not to mention the worldbuilding and the relationships. And since the end of the book left those characters with a clear goal in an interesting situation with a bad guy designed to be creepy as well as challenging, picking up the second book in the series was…
February 25, 2020
In 2016 (the year reading challenges really took off on the Internet) a good friend asked if I’d like to do a reading challenge. Most of the challenges I’d seen so far that year were fluffy — nothing wrong with popular fiction, etc., but I’d been looking for something different, as was my friend. We are both interested in social…
February 20, 2020
Working at a bookstore has its sad moments. That may sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s true. Going through the shelves and picking out all the books that are due to be returned is one of them. I always get sad when books we only have a few copies of have to get sent back. True, often…
February 19, 2020
Howdy, dear Chicers! Well, it’s February, which means groundhogs, candy hearts, and, if you’re like my friend Tom, one birthday every four years. February is also a wonderful time for a discussion about the perks and perils of writing. Imagine it, if you will: Two people, a man and a woman, sitting across from one another in matching leather armchairs.…
February 18, 2020
Examining the weird/gothic landscape through eyes firmly embedded with set of rainbow lenses, Tanith Lee erected severely Weird Gothic Towers and Spires throughout the map, starting with her debut novel, The Dragon Hoard in 1971. Her edifices are constructed using the building blocks of fairy tales, myths, standard fantasy, vampires, and just plain strangeness, and are adorned in proper Gothic…
February 17, 2020
They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Jessica McHugh, who joined us back in November 2018 and…