Molly Templeton

A review of H.G. Parry's new fantasy novel

When a story opens on a beach, in the wake of a harrowing plane crash, I think of Lost. It’s wired into my brain, a holdover from a very different era. But Madeline Ashby’s Glass Houses, apart from the plane crash, is not that kind of story—the kind…

Have I ever met a lonelier character in SFF than Karys Eska? Karys appears to have no one in her life—other than a tenuous professional relationship with the Second Mayor of Psikamit, who hires Karys in order to make use of her gifts. She’s a…

When you read a lot of science fiction, you spend time in a lot of unpleasant futures: natural disasters, human disasters, alien invasions, pandemics, all of the above at once. But rarely has a hot mess of a future felt as devastatingly intimate as…

It hasn’t even been three years since James S.A. Corey—also known as Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—published Leviathan Falls, the final novel of the Expanse. It feels longer, somehow. But three years is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to wait…

The other week I wrote a column that was, in large part, about how I could not figure out how to review Vajra Chandrasekera’s second novel, Rakesfall. I thought if I put in the column all the things around the book that I could not stop thinking…

It is a difficult thing to review a book that is, in large part, about the subjectivity of stories. Anything I tell you about Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe will be only a fragment of what it actually is. Yes, this is the case with most of…

Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson’s second novel, can be read as a standalone, or you can read it as a followup that’s something of a mirror image to The Space Between Worlds, her 2020 debut. Space was set mostly inside the walls of Wiley City,…

The last book I read by S.E.—who sometimes goes by Sarah—Porter was the YA novel Vassa in the Night, a (loose, wild) retelling of the story “Vasilisa the Beautiful.” In that book, Baba Yaga (sorry, Babs Yagg) has a bodega in Brooklyn, which makes a…

I finished The Book of Love over a month ago and yet the whole, massive book continues to live, as they say, rent-free in my head. Images of tigers swirl with visions of temples rising out of the sea. I find myself thinking about asparagus and…

A phrase I think about sometimes—maybe too often—is three simple words: “Earn a living.” They’re so common, these words. A statement of fact. You have to earn a living. You have to make money that you can exchange for necessities and goods. But why…

In the second book of Gregoy Maguire’s Another Day trilogy, young (and somewhat amnesiac) Rain says, “I’m learning there’s never a way home, only a way forward. So let’s take it.” The green granddaughter of Elphaba Thropp, Rain spends the first two…

The magic system in Pascale Lacelle’s debut YA novel, Curious Tides, is so perfect, so logical (in a certain kind of magical way), that I’m a little bit shocked I haven’t encountered it before. In Lacelle’s world, people have magical powers that are…

If you read Mona Awad’s Bunny, it probably lives rent-free in your head. The story of a very unusual MFA cohort, Bunny is creepy and bloody and made up of bits of fairy tales and mythology and pop culture, all sewn together with the particular genius…

“Fetter isn’t even the only feral child of a messiah in his social network.” This is not the first sentence of The Saint of Bright Doors, but it effectively sets the scene—at least for a while. Vajra Chandrasekera’s immersive debut passes through…

Thief Liar Lady had me at con-woman Cinderella. Actually, it had me at D.L. Soria, whose Iron Cast (written as Destiny Soria) remains one of my favorite YA debuts of the last decade. This new book is Soria’s adult fantasy debut, a glittering and…

Nicole Kornher-Stace’s new novella Flight & Anchor describes itself, on the cover, as “A Firebreak Story.” This is true; the story concerns two characters who appear in Kornher-Stace’s excellent 2021 novel Firebreak. But technically, it could also…

If you have been looking for a new disaster baby to love, let me introduce you to Sunai. He hasn’t aged since he first died, seventeen years ago; his body has, as he puts it, a persistent case of life. In order to forget the things that led to his…

In decades of reading SFF, I have never come across a world like the Library in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Library of Broken Worlds. Some things about it are familiar, though it would be rude to reveal the most important of those aspects. But most of…

Jacqueline Holland, in her debut novel, avoids calling her blood-drinking immortals vampires. They don’t fear the sun or garlic, and no one here is turning into a bat. But when a previously dead creature rises from the earth, deathless and feeding…