Siavahda's Blog, page 6

Daughters of Flood and Fury Grand Tour: Mt Hilaga!

Welcome to day three of the Daughters of Flood and Fury grand tour! This is where a bunch of us guide you around the setting of Gabriella Buba’s Stormbringer Saga, spotlighting gorgeous locales and incredible characters – and hyping you up for the release of Daughters of Flood and Fury, the final book of the duology, out next month!

The Stormbringer Saga is an anti-colonial fantasy featuring extremely excellent (and excellently queer) women in an archipelago inspired by the Philippines. Stormcallers, firetenders, and tide-touched wield elemental magic backed by powerful goddesses – and none of them are happy with the Codicíans who’ve stolen their islands.

I absolutely adored book one, Saints of Storm and Sorrow, and I’m delighted to be taking part in the grand tour for book two!

Today I get to introduce you to Mt Hilaga, the volcano that is home to the Firetender’s Conclave on the island of Aynila – and to Sina, our favourite pyromaniac!

Sina – short for Sinagtala Prinsa – is the cousin of Alon, one of the love interests and POV characters of Saints of Storm and Fury, the first book of the duology. Like most firetenders, Sina was vehemently opposed to the faction who wanted to appease the Codicíans, and in Daughters of Flood and Fury, Sina is back on her preferred side of the Saliwain River, at her forge in the metalworkers’ conclave on the slopes of Mt Hilaga. Get a glimpse of her in this exclusive excerpt!

Sina was certain that this year, all the gods-blessed would be chosen firetenders. The Amihan Moon was just a week away, all the archipelago’s wild magic burning fever bright. Aynila had been preparing for months. —Daughters of Flood and Fury

Mt Hilaga is inspired by the very real Taal Volcano, which is the 2nd-most active volcano in the Philippines, and one of the smallest active volcanoes in the world. The Taal Volcano rests at the centre of Taal Lake like an emerald set in lapis, an incredibly beautiful natural wonder people come from all over the world to see.

Fortunately, Mt Hilaga is not nearly as active as its inspiration, because the firetenders use their powers to keep her slumbering. If she ever woke, she would rain ash and ruin on the city of Aynila, which dwells in her shadow.

From this side of the Palisade Lunurin couldn’t see the city of Aynila, only the wide blue stretch of the bay and Mount Hilaga, dominating the horizon to the north. The volcano’s verdant green slopes were striped on the seaward side with narrow black lava flows, streaming from the peak into the sea. A bad sign. —Saints of Storm and Sorrow

All the volcanoes in the Stormbringer Archipelago are sacred, which reflects the importance of volcanoes in the indigenous religions of the Philippines. We already know from Saints of Storm and Sorrow that the gods of the Stormbringer Saga are very displeased that the Codicíans have actually been mining Mt Hilaga. Personally, between that and Sina’s fiery leadership of the local firetenders, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mt Hilaga becomes extremely plot-relevant in the next book…!

To receive a professionally illustrated, full-colour map of the Stormbringer Saga Archipelago AND a signed (or even personalised, if you want!) copy of the book, preorder Daughters of Flood and Fury from Blue Willow Bookshop!

(They might be in Texas, but they do ship internationally!)

Daughters bursts the banks on July 22nd! Follow along on the grand tour leading up to it with the #DaughtersofFloodandFuryGrandTour hashtag on Instagram and Bluesky!

previous stop on the tour : next stop on the tour (link will be added when it’s live!)

The post Daughters of Flood and Fury Grand Tour: Mt Hilaga! appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Must-Have Monday #242

Must-Have Monday is a feature highlighting which of the coming week’s new releases I’m excited for. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all books being published that week; only those I’m interested in out of those I’m aware of! The focus is diverse SFF, but other stuff sneaks in occasionally too.

EIGHT books this week!

(Books are listed in order of pub date, then Adult SFF, Adult Other, YA SFF, YA Other, MG SFF.)

Reflections of Lilje Damselfly by Natalie Kelda
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MC with chronic pain
Published on: 23rd June 2025
Goodreads

When a mysterious ailment refuses to leave water nymph Lilje, her father sends her to a human spa retreat. Lilje quickly discovers she has a lot to learn about human nature and culture when she accidentally scandalises the Edwardian spa guests by showing up undressed.

In hope of relieving her chronic pain and fatigue, she tries her best to fit in and silence her ability to speak with the elements, plants, and animals around her. But when the secret of her heritage is revealed and Lilje falls in love with a human, she faces a difficult choice. Give up everything she thought she was, or live forever in pain and regret of what could have been.

Reflections of Lilje Damselfly is a short standalone novel set in a magical version of early 20th century England.

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This sounds very different from anything I’ve read before, and I’m excited for it!

Incendiant (Joan of Crows Book 2) by Virginia Black
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F
Published on: 24th June 2025
Goodreads

Author Virginia Black burst onto the queer speculative fiction scene with her powerful debut, Consecrated Ground. Now Joan of Crows returns to Calvert in this high-octane thriller that pits good versus evil in a penultimate showdown.

War witch Joan Matthews wants little more than to build a life with Leigh Phan. Their hometown is rebuilding under Joan’s protection, but not everyone is happy with her solution to the most recent vampire crisis.

Meanwhile, Leigh’s bloodling powers lead to unforeseen consequences, and Joan is forced to honor a favor owed to a dangerous foe. Neither knows a greater threat lurks behind seemingly unrelated attacks across the land.

Together, Joan and Leigh once saved the town of Calvert. Now that they are separated, each must learn to save herself, or all their gains will be forfeited—and everyone they know will pay the price.

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The first book in this series inspired a cult following; now that we’re getting book two, I think it’s time I dive in too!

A Legionnaire's Guide to Love and Peace by Emily Skrutskie
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MCs, queernorm world
Published on: 24th June 2025
Goodreads

In this charming fantasy with a swoony friends-to-lovers romance, two soldiers must decide the futures they want in the wake of a last-chance hook-up on the night before the world was supposed to end.

On the eve of the battle that will decide the realm of Telrus’s fate, Katrien takes a hard look at her prospects. A mere legionnaire, she and her spear will be at the fore in the morning, facing off against the Demon Lord and his wretched army, and it’s all but certain she’ll perish in the fight. But if the end of the world is mere hours away, there’s no reason not to hook up with her handsome, dedicated battle partner Emory—despite any anti-fraternization policies their centurion may have in place.

Only, the world doesn’t end the next day. Instead, an insufferable prince raised in hiding comes out of nowhere with a plucky band of heroes, defeats the Demon Lord, and seals the rift to the hellish plane. The realm is saved. The war is over. And Kat suddenly has a lot more future than she knows what to do with. It’s a future that could include Emory . . . if only he weren’t so set on staying enlisted with the very army Kat was unwillingly drafted into.

And while the Demon Lord has been destroyed, peace is still a long march away. When Kat inadvertently draws the eye of the prince, she, Emory, and the rest of their motley unit are pulled to the fore of the formation—and the heart of the danger—as the army embarks on one last campaign. The mission: laying a road as a foundation for the prince’s future rule. The real mission: scouring the last of the Demon Lord’s servants from the material plane.

As Kat and Emory work to secure a lasting peace, they’ll have to decide what they want their futures to look like—and if there’s room for love at the end of the road.

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I got my wires crossed somehow and thought this was F/F? It’s not, but telling an Epic Fantasy story through the pov of characters who wouldn’t even get names in a typical Epic Fantasy… I’m intrigued!

Tempest by K. Ibura
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Magical Realism, YA
Representation: Black MC
Published on: 24th June 2025
Goodreads

After her mother passed away in Hurricane Katrina, Veronique moved to her mawmaw’s house in the Louisiana countryside. Mawmaw always said that Veronique needed to hide her power over the wind, but one day, she has to use it to save a neighbor’s son from drowning. To protect Veronique, her mawmaw immediately sends her to live with her aunt in New Orleans.

NOLA is nothing like Veronique could have imagined—she’s finally attending traditional school, she gets to bond with cousins that she’s never met, and she even rides on her first highway. Though she quickly falls in with a group of friends at school—and one boy that she’d like to be more than her friend—there’s also a higher risk of discovery in the city. When one of her cousins’ friends figures out the truth, V learns about a secret organization called the Vaunted that comes after people with elemental magic.

The Vaunted is closing in, and V will be forced on the run to hide from their sinister intentions. V’s left with two major questions: Can she trust anyone? And will she ever get a chance to be a normal girl again?

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This sounds a lot more Fantasy than Magical Realism to me, but either way, I really want to check it out! Sounds absolutely gorgeous.

A Treachery of Swans by A.B. Poranek
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: F/F
Published on: 24th June 2025
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of Where the Dark Stands Still comes an atmospheric fantasy based on Swan Lake, following Odile as her plan to restore magic to her kingdom gets disrupted by a murder—forcing her to beg for help from the young woman whose identity she stole.

Can two girls—one enchanted, one the enchantress—save their kingdom and each other?

Two hundred years ago, a slighted deity stole the magic from Auréal and vanished without a trace. But seventeen-year-old Odile has a plan. All her life, her father, a vengeful sorcerer, has raised her for one singular task: infiltrate the royal palace and steal the king’s crown, an artefact with enough power to restore magic. But to enter the palace, she must assume the identity of a noblewoman. She chooses Marie d’Odette: famed for her beauty, a rumored candidate for future queen…and Odile’s childhood-friend-turned-sworn-enemy.
With her father’s help, Odile transforms Marie into a swan and takes her place at court. But when the king is brutally murdered and her own brother is accused, her plans are thrown into chaos. Desperate to free her brother, Odile is forced to team up with none other than elegant, infuriating Marie, the girl she has cursed…and the girl she can’t seem to stop thinking about despite her best efforts.

To make matters worse, there are whispers that the king’s murder was not at the hands of man, but beast. Torn between loyalty to her father and her growing feelings for Marie, Odile becomes tangled in a web of treachery and deceit. To save her kingdom, she must find the true path to magic…and find the real killer before they—or it—strikes again.

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Who else loved the Swan Princess movies? I predict this will be very different, but hopefully as much fun!

Goldheart (Foxglove & Feud Book 1) by Tess Carletta
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Black MC, queer MCs, M/M, secondary F/F, neurodivergent rep, queernorm world
Published on: 25th June 2025
Goodreads

A world plagued by sun sickness can be both terrible and beautiful.

Senna Kane was plucked from his orphanage and molded into the perfect Goldheart—the personal bodyguard to the prince. It's a demanding job, made harder by the headstrong prince's desire to solve the tension between the darkness-bathed Talsura and the sun-welcoming Redwind, but Senna has vowed to do his best.

Defying the law, Senna and the prince sneak out of their kingdom to meet with the Redwindan princess to work towards peace. There, Senna finds himself spending more time with the princess' charming guard, Emrys, who challenges Senna to try bold and impossible things—like harnessing the sun's power to grow plants from his own body.

The quest for peace comes at odds with the two lovers as the sun sickness, terrifying monsters, and cruel rulers try to tear them apart at every turn. The danger leads Senna to what may be an impossible choice: to abandon his prince, his duty and life's purpose, or lose the chance to become the man he could've been if that duty had never found him.

GOLDHEART is a story about chosen family, choosing love, and the impossible feat of staying good in times of darkness.

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Plant magic! Plant magic with plants grown from your body! And – exposure to sunlight makes you ill in this setting??? Definitely checking this one out!

Radhika Rages at the Crater School by Chaz Brenchley
Genres: Sci Fi, YA
Representation: Biracial Desi MC
Published on: 26th June 2025
Goodreads

“I won’t go. I won’t, I won’t!”

Radhika Harvey does not want to go to the Crater School, but her father offers her no choice. Radhika’s beloved mother is deathly ill in the Sanatorium across the Lowell Crater from the school; it’s the obvious place to send her. And how can a disgraced father care properly for a young girl on his own?

The Crater School has taken in children from all across the province, which means from many different cultures and creeds, but never yet a half-Indian army brat who absolutely doesn’t want to be there. Her arrival—and her temper—will challenge both staff and pupils, throughout an explosive Martian summer...

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I uncomplicatedly love this series, which is so very escapist. They’re basically the traditional English Boarding School Stories, but set on Mars! And each book so for has worked as a standalone, so you can jump in wherever you’re most interested!

Run Like Hell by Eira Brand
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Representation: Trans MC
Published on: 30th June 2025
Goodreads

A shootout at a streetside bazaar. A pursuit through darkened city streets. A courier brutally murdered by his pursuers. Blown apart and left to rot in the gutter. All of that makes for an average day in the bowels of the megatropolis of New York City— at the bottom of the Barrel.

But for Raide, that day was anything but average. That courier was a friend— probably Raide's best friend— and he left a life-changing contract behind. The job and its promised rewards force Raide to face impossible odds, all while eluding relentless corporate security agents and outrunning a horrifying plague that's sweeping the city.

When faced with such a situation, there are really only two options...

Lie down and die or run like hell.

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Gory, action-packed cyberpunk that is, from the early reviews, genuinely cyberpunk (which we all know most cyberpunk isn’t!) I’ve seen this recced for fans of Andrew Joseph White, which should tell us all we need to know!

You can read a quick excerpt here!

Will you be reading any of these? Did I miss any releases you think I should know about? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #242 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

You can find the releases I’m most anticipating this year over on my Unmissable list, but I use Can’t-Wait Wednesday to feature books I’m hopeful about but aren’t 100% sure will be five star reads.

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford!

We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford
Genres: Adult, Horror
Representation: Brown MCs
Published on: 22nd July 2025
Goodreads

Amelia is a ripper, a monster who feeds on violent people who have so thoroughly forsaken love that they’ve burned away their souls. Unseen and unnoticed by most of society and living as both hunter and hunted, the only emotion rippers feel is anger. But Amelia is different from her fellow rippers and also feels happiness and sadness, fear and love. To her mother, Danjay, that makes Amelia the strangest of all monsters.

Driven from their home by religious zealots, Amelia and Danjay must learn to survive in the city of Medea, where violent men rule and kill anyone who opposes them. Worse, Amelia has never hunted on her own, and her mother is ill and growing weaker by the day. Only a chance encounter with a human who can see Amelia gives her any hope that she might be able to save her mother.

To succeed, Amelia must learn to hunt in an increasingly dangerous city brought to the brink of war by the corrupt, rich and powerful. Amelia will also have to discover if her differences from her fellow rippers makes her weak, as her mother believes, or if she can instead be a new kind of monster that the world has never seen before.

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Jason Sanford has been on my radar since his book Plague Birds (which is on my ereader, and has been for YEARS, but which I have tragically not yet read); more recently, I subscribed to his Patreon, where he reports on news in the SFF community and on the ongoing situation around the garbage predictive-text algorithms people call LLMs (except they’re not learning anything) or AIs (except they’re not intelligent). Both kinds of news reports have been godsends for me, since my fibro makes it really hard to stay up to date on news I care about. So having someone gather a lot of it in once place for me is wonderful.

I didn’t realise at first that We Who Hunt Alexanders was written by the same person who writes those news reports! I found out about the book somewhere else, not on his Patreon (where, I can’t remember now) and only today put it together!

Anyway, on to the book!

We Who Hunt Alexanders sounds dark as fuck – but also absolutely fascinating??? Between the thumb’s up from Samantha Mills – author of one of my favourite books, The Wings Upon Her Back – and these two blurbs–

“If you could rid the world of evil by eating it―by literally becoming the hell that will torture the blackguards you consume―would you? Jason Sanford’s We Who Hunt Alexanders puts this very moral quandary before us, in a grisly, action-packed tale of murder, loyalty, and moral zugzwangs. By testing the human heart under the most unimaginably difficult circumstances, Sanford delivers a frightening, cathartic meditation on just how far we’d go for the ones we love―even when we aren’t sure what love even is.”―Carlos Hernandez, author of Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

“Amelia, the protagonist of this remarkable novella by Jason Sanford, is at once adorable and arcane, and her experiences are both deeply relatable and utterly terrifying. What I loved the most was that underneath everything, this is a story of friendship, in all its myriad forms: from the mysterious sisterhood of the rippers to the individual friendships between characters that aren’t coaxed into becoming ‘something more.’ It’s also a story about families, both biological and found. Unexpected pockets of tenderness are folded into every scene of this book about ancient man-eating monsters with entirely too many teeth.” ―Mimi Mondal, author of His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light

–I’m convinced this is something I need to try and read. It might well be too dark for me! But I want to TRY. Monster sisterhood? A central mom/daughter relationship? A horror-twist on the ‘sin-eater’ concept? FLAILING WITH EMOTIONS? That all sounds amazing! Well worth some potential nightmares.

*grabby hands*

The post I Can’t Wait For…We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

10 Books on My Summer tbr

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Check out upcoming Top Ten themes on Jana’s blog!

Taking it as read (hah!) that I obviously need to get through all my arcs and Unmissables, here are 10 books other than those that I’m determined to get through before autumn!

(Will I get to them? No idea, I’m a big mood-reader, but I have the best of intentions!

The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Goodreads

Drawing on Chinese and Mongolian elements, award-winning poet Mary Soon Lee has penned an epic tale of politics, intrigue, and dragons perfect for fans of Game of Thrones and Beowulf.

As the fourth-born prince of Meqing, Xau was never supposed to be king. But when his three older brothers are all deemed unfit to rule and eaten by a dragon, as is the custom, Xau suddenly finds himself on the Meqinese throne. The early years of his reign are marred by brutal earthquakes and floods, and the long-simmering tension with the neighboring country of Innis finally erupts into war. Worst of all, demons rise out of legend to walk the realm again, leaving death and destruction in their wake. In a desperate gamble, Xau must broker an uneasy peace with his former enemies and hope their combined strength is enough to vanquish the demons before it's too late.

The Sign of the Dragon is comprised of over 300 individual poems, including the Rhysling-winning "Interregnum." The first 60 poems appeared in the 2015 Dark Renaissance Books publication Crowned, which won the 2016 Elgin Award, and many individual poems have appeared in award-winning literary magazines such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spillway, and Strange Horizons. Collected together in its entirety for the very first time, with over 200 never-before-published poems, readers can finally enjoy King Xau's story of sacrifice and war and dragons from beginning to end.

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I found this on a list of ‘deeply unusual’ fantasy – and I think it fits the descriptor, since it’s a story told in hundreds of poems! I’ve been really interested lately in novels that play with format/medium (are either of those the right term?) and a poem-novel definitely counts. Plus, everywhere I look I see nothing but adoring love for it from those who’ve read it!

Engines of Oblivion (The Memory War, #2) by Karen Osborne
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Goodreads

Karen Osborne continues her science fiction action and adventure series the Memory War with Engines of Oblivion, the sequel to Architects of Memory—the corporations running the galaxy are about to learn not everyone can be bought.

Natalie Chan gained her corporate citizenship, but barely survived the battle for Tribulation.

Now corporate has big plans for Natalie. Horrible plans.

Locked away in Natalie's missing memory is salvation for the last of an alien civilization and the humans they tried to exterminate. The corporation wants total control of both—or their deletion.

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I just finished Architects of Memory not long ago, and I an RABID to dive into the sequel! I was so delighted with the aliens especially; after so many books giving me aliens that were just human brains in dress-up bodies, the ones here are FANTASTIC! I doubt we’re going to to a super deep dive on them, but we don’t need to; it’s not the amount of worldbuilding, okay, it’s the quality, and here it’s top tier! Plus the prose is… I can only describe it as silken. Not lush, not purple prose-y, but nonetheless: silken.

Blue Futures, Break Open: A Novel by Zoë Gadegbeku
Genres: Adult, Magical Realism, Speculative Fiction
Goodreads

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth—not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island’s seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls. Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone’s safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.

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I don’t impulse-buy books very often, but I fell in love with the premise (and the sample available on the Big River site) of this one the moment I stumbled across it, and bought a copy immediately. …MONTHS ago! It’s ridiculous that I haven’t sat down and read it yet, it’s MORE than time I do that!

These Burning Stars (The Kindom Trilogy, #1) by Bethany Jacobs
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Goodreads

A dangerous cat-and-mouse quest for revenge. An empire that spans star systems, built on the bones of a genocide. A carefully hidden secret that could collapse worlds, hunted by three women with secrets of their own. All collide in this twisty, explosive space opera debut, perfect for readers of Arkady Martine and Kameron Hurley.

Jun Ironway—hacker, con artist, and occasional thief—has gotten her hands on a piece of contraband that could set her up for proof that implicates the powerful Nightfoot family in a planet-wide genocide seventy-five years ago. The Nightfoots control the precious sevite that fuels interplanetary travel through three star systems. And someone is sure to pay handsomely for anything that could break their hold.

Of course, anything valuable is also dangerous. The Kindom, the ruling power of the star systems, is inextricably tied up in the Nightfoots’ monopoly—and they can’t afford to let Jun expose the truth. They task two of their most brutal clerics with hunting her preternaturally stoic Chono, and brilliant hothead Esek, who also happens to be the heir to the Nightfoot empire.

But Chono and Esek are haunted in turn by a figure from their shared past, known only as Six. What Six truly wants is anyone’s guess. And the closer they get to finding Jun, the surer Chono is that Six is manipulating them all.

​It's a game that could destroy their lives and devastate the stars. And they have no choice but to see it through to the end.

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I’ve been seeing this trilogy on rec lists of queer sff for YEARS, and I want to catch up in time to read the last book when it comes out later this year!

Castaways by Craig Schaefer
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads

"Under our tutelage here at the Academy, you will receive a thorough instruction in occult history and practice, and learn to traffic with certain clandestine powers. You will face many ordeals, but you will emerge stranger than you have ever been. I'll change your life forever...if you'll let me."

Trapped in a dead-end town and a dead-end life, Amy Nettle dreams of escaping her abusive father and starting over, somewhere far away. The arrival of a black envelope heralds just that, in a way she never could have imagined. Whisked away to the Saunders Academy, a Gothic manse in the heart of an eternal storm-tossed ocean, Amy is one of dozens of teenagers plucked from dozens of parallel Earths and selected for an education in witchcraft. It seems too good to be true...except.

Except no one will tell them why they were chosen, or what happens after graduation. Or why the dormitories on the fourth floor are completely empty. There are tentacled leviathans and carnivorous mermaids in the water, a saboteur stalking the halls, and danger lurks around every corner. Worst of all, failure means the Arch of a one-way trip back to where you came from, without your memories or your magic.

Falling in with a crew of misfits, Amy realizes they're all in the same boat: with nothing but ruin waiting back home, failure is not an option. Then there's Vail, an enigmatic tomboy who makes her heart flutter. For the first time in her life, Amy has something to lose.

Amy and her new friends will have to untangle the dark secrets at the heart of the Saunders Academy and master its mysteries, because there are only two choices left: graduate, or die.

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I know I’m far from the only reader seeking a great, queer magic school story, and while we did get Incandescent this year, that was from the pov of a teacher. So while it’s easily my favourite magic school book to date, I’m still craving the student pov! Castaways – which also came out this year – has that, and looks extremely promising (I already know Schaefer’s a wonderful writer from their book Sworn to the Night). Plus, the sequel comes later this week, which definitely means it’s time to hop to it!

The Witches of Moonshyne Manor by Bianca Marais
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Goodreads

A coven of modern-day witches. A magical heist-gone-wrong. A looming threat.

Five octogenarian witches gather as an angry mob threatens to demolish Moonshyne Manor. All eyes turn to the witch in charge, Queenie, who confesses they've fallen far behind on their mortgage payments. Still, there's hope, since the imminent return of Ruby--one of the sisterhood who's been gone for thirty-three years--will surely be their salvation.

But the mob is only the start of their troubles. One man is hellbent on avenging his family for the theft of a legacy he claims was rightfully his. In an act of desperation, Queenie makes a bargain with an evil far more powerful than anything they've ever faced. Then things take a turn for the worse when Ruby's homecoming reveals a seemingly insurmountable obstacle instead of the solution to all their problems.

The witches are determined to save their home and themselves, but their aging powers are no match for increasingly malicious threats. Thankfully, they get a bit of help from Persephone, a feisty TikToker eager to smash the patriarchy. As the deadline to save the manor approaches, fractures among the sisterhood are revealed, and long-held secrets are exposed, culminating in a fiery confrontation with their enemies.

Funny, tender and uplifting, the novel explores the formidable power that can be discovered in aging, found family and unlikely friendships. Marais' clever prose offers as much laughter as insight, delving deeply into feminism, identity and power dynamics while stirring up intrigue and drama through secrets, lies and sex. Heartbreaking and heart-mending, it will make you grateful for the amazing women in your life.

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This has been on my tbr for ages and I want to get to it, damn it! I liked the first few pages and I’m hopeful this isn’t going to be (accidentally or not) TERFy (which happens way too often with girl!power-witchy novels). Plus, we don’t see enough older protagonists, okay?

The Pride of Chanur (Chanur, #1) by C.J. Cherryh
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Goodreads

The first in a series of “lively tales of swashbuckling capitalism in space,” featuring a fascinating alien culture based on the social structure of lion prides (Locus)

Chaos breaks out when the captain of an all-female alien crew agrees to rescue a human male wanted by their enemy . . .

No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt toothed and blunt-fingered, Tully was the sole surviving member of his company of humans―a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown―and he was a prisoner of his discoverers and captors―the sadistic, treacherous kif―until his escape onto the hani ship, The Pride of Chanur.

Little did he know when he threw himself upon the mercy of The Pride and her crew that he put the entire hani species in jeopardy and imperiled the peace of the Compact itself . . . for the information this fugitive held could be the ruin or glory of any of the species at Meetpoint Station.

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I’m finding myself reluctant to keep tearing through the Foreigner series, because soon I’ll have no more of them to read! But CJ Cherryh has written many, many other books, and I’m really excited to start checking them out! I thought I’d want to pounce on her fantasy books first (they are very much the minority, most of her work is scifi) but instead I’ve been drawn to the Chanur series. So that’s up next!

Semiosis (Semiosis, #1) by Sue Burke
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Goodreads

In this character driven novel of first contact by debut author Sue Burke, human survival hinges on an bizarre alliance.

Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that mammals are more than tools.

Forced to land on a planet they aren't prepared for, human colonists rely on their limited resources to survive. The planet provides a lush but inexplicable landscape--trees offer edible, addictive fruit one day and poison the next, while the ruins of an alien race are found entwined in the roots of a strange plant. Conflicts between generations arise as they struggle to understand one another and grapple with an unknowable alien intellect.

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I’m always looking for stories about properly not-human aliens, and Semiosis was recommended to me on the basis of that by several sources! And after looking at the first chapter, I’m already in love with Burke’s prose!

Switch by Justina Robson
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Science Fantasy
Goodreads

This groundbreaking new novel from one of the genre's most respected authors is a thrilling mix of science, magic and politics.

In Harmony, only model citizens are welcome.

A perfect society must be maintained. The defective must be eradicated. For orphans like Nico and Twostar, this means a life that's brutal, regulated and short.

But Nico and Twostar are survivors, and when they're offered a way out of the slums, they take it.

Unfortunately, no one told Nico the deal included being sentenced to death for the murder of one of Harmony's most notorious gang leaders.

Or that to gain his freedom, first he must lose his mind.

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This one’s very simple: I stumbled across this review here, and was convinced I need to read this book! (Beware spoilers at the link!)

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett, Craig Laurance Gidney, John Kaiine, Martha Wells, Nisi Shawl, C.S.E. Cooney, Theodora Goss, Maya Deane, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mike Allen, Andy Duncan, Rocío Rincón Fernández, C.L. Hellisen, Getty Hesse, Starlene Justice, Amelia Mangan, Michael Yuya Montroy, Marisca Pichette, K.T. Wagner, Ann VanderMeer, Julia DeRidder
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Sci Fi
Published on: 1st July 2025
Goodreads

Sixteen new stories from some of today’s most renowned authors. All inspired by the master storyteller Tanith Lee.

Drowning cities and unicorns. Burning deserts and forgotten gods. Golems, elf warriors, and inner-Earthers. Alien lifeforms and museum workers. Ancient plagues and the future of humanity. The familiar and the fantastical. Each story in this anthology is both unique and compelling: from fairy-tale retellings to romance-tinged high fantasy, from nihilistic horror to gripping science fiction. Immersive, wide-ranging, and sublime, Storyteller features worlds and characters that are sure to travel with you long after the last page has been read.

Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Maya Deane, Andy Duncan, Rocío Rincón Fernández , Theodora Goss, CL Hellisen, Getty Hesse, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Starlene Justice, Amelia Mangan, Michael Yuya Montroy, Marisca Pichette, Nisi Shawl, KT Wagner, Martha Wells

Foreword by John Kaiine. Afterword by Ann VanderMeer.

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This one’s not officially released yet, but my copy isn’t an arc – I backed the crowdfunding campaign, so I got my copy early!

I generally have a bad time with multi-author collections and thus avoid them, but a) many of the contributors are deeply beloved faves of mine, and b) they’re writing in honour of Tanith Lee and I’m hoping they’ll be trying to mimic her style because of that. (And if the implication’s not clear, I love her style.)

What’s on your summer reading list?

The post 10 Books on My Summer tbr appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Mini-review: The Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi

Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Black bisexual MC, Black bisexual MC/love interest, Black bisexual love interest with vitiligo, F/M/M
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; first-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 4th November 2025
ISBN: 0063323206
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling author Akwaeke Emezi comes a steamy paranormal romance set in the Black South—a bold new foray that takes us on a journey of magic and fantasy, from the whispering creeks outside the city of Salvation to the very depths of Hell itself.

Tenderhearted Galilee was raised by the Kincaids, a formidable clan of Black women sequestered deep in the weeping willows and dark rushing creeks of their land. Galilee has always known that she’s different—that there is an old and unknowable secret around her very existence. It has been a hollow ache inside her since her childhood, something she assumes she will always have to live with.

Until she meets Lucifer Helel. He’s fronting as the head of security for her wealthy friend Oriaku’s family, protecting a mysterious, ancient artifact, but from the moment she lays eyes on him, Gali knows he’s not human. From her first incendiary touch, Lucifer knows something even Gali herself doesn’t—that she isn’t human either. 

Leviathan. As Lucifer’s most trusted prince of Hell, Levi is ruthless and determined to eliminate the intolerable danger that is Galilee before she brings death and disaster to those he loves. While unseen battles rage between Hell, Heaven, and earth, Lucifer and Galilee’s attraction threatens to bring all the structures of their existence crashing down around them.

Soon, loyalties will be shattered and reformed as Kincaid secrets clash with the princes of Hell, driving even the most powerful to their knees. Galilee Kincaid must decide if she will step into herself and embrace the consequences of power in this astonishing, seductive, and wildly original fantasy.

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.

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So the important thing to know is: if you don’t enjoy paranormal romance, The Son of the Morning isn’t going to change your mind.

that’s it that’s the review

I was really hoping that because I love Emezi’s writing AND angelic lore, those things would overcome my dislike of paranormal romance. I definitely assumed that Emezi would write paranormal romance that, you know…didn’t fall into all the pitfalls/cliches of the genre? Not every paranormal romance book has stupid violent alpha males! Or instalust! Or personalities and opinions doing 180s at random! I figured an Emezi paranormal romance wouldn’t!

It does, though.

If you like popular paranormal romance what are you doing reading my ridiculously niche blog? and enjoy or don’t mind the common tropes/genre conventions, then you’ll probably have a great time with this. Lucifer quickly comes to worship the ground Gali walks on; Gali’s arc is very much about coming into her power and being unafraid of what she’s capable of; there’s a refreshing focus on female pleasure; both leads have strong family bonds (found-family for Lucifer); we have women who don’t hate each other; a sprinkling of kink. Son of the Morning even takes the time to point out and question some of the ridiculousness it depends on (Gali being disgusted with herself for wanting Lucifer despite his refusing to guarantee her safety, isn’t it WEIRD how this is all so intense so fast, etc) albeit without actually resolving any of it.

It’s also a very queer novel, which was a pleasant surprise from a M/F romance – although perhaps not a surprise from Emezi, since You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty was another M/F romance with casually bisexual leads. Son of the Morning brings its queerness front and centre, though, with one of Gali’s friends being a sapphic trans woman and Lucifer still extremely close with his male ex Leviathan, a past romance that’s extremely plot-relevant.

There’s room for a sequel, but it stands alone perfectly well. The right reader will probably love it.

The rest of us…should probably not go near it. Despite the evocatively beautiful opening introducing us to Gali’s family of supernaturally-touched women, all the cliched flaws of the genre are here on full display. Lucifer and his princes (his inner circle/found family) give us a truly excessive amount of violent, alpha male posturing, with lots of threats of violence taking the place of reasonable discussion. Gali and Lucifer experience classic instalust, which wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t lead to an inexplicable true love (the main chunk of the book takes place over 24 hours, in which Gali and Lucifer go from strangers to soulmates). Personalities flip-flop WILDLY, with abrupt, unexplained 180s of strongly-held opinions happening everywhere. Bits of interesting worldbuilding are scattered here and there but never elaborated on, which is particularly infuriating alongside the constant infodumping/telling-not-showing. The central conflict – a mask with a very bloody history threatening to open a gate to Hell – makes little sense, since we’re never told WHY Lucifer turned it into a Hell-portal, or why he did so and then left it with the Vatican instead of, you know, keeping it. Lucifer goes from refusing to promise he or his princes won’t kill Gali, to kneeling at her command in front of witnesses, and I have no idea how they went from one to the other (it’s literally two sequential scenes!) And please don’t get me started on Leviathan, whose 180 is possibly the most dramatic and definitely the least explicable!

So if there is a sequel, I will definitely not be reading it. Even with the occasional beautiful line or brilliant bit of phrasing, there’s so much nonsense, so much toxicity (I really do not have patience for or interest in these ‘alpha male’ types), so much handwaved, and so much straight-up-stupid. I’m really disappointed, but I guess that’s mostly on me, for getting my hopes up that this wouldn’t be what it said it was.

The post Mini-review: The Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

What Fantasy Is Supposed to Be: The Mercy Makers by Tessa Gratton

The Mercy Makers (The Moon Heresies, #1) by Tessa Gratton
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual brown MC, secondary brown sapphic character, minor nonbinary character, minor trans character, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, present-tense
Published on: 17th June 2025
ISBN: B0DJLTYMKR
Goodreads

A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love—either way, her choice will upend the world, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.

Can an empire trip and fall on a mere strand of silk?

Iriset is a prodigy and an outlaw. The daughter of a powerful criminal, she dons her alter ego Silk to create magical disguises for those in her father’s organization, but she longs to do more with her talent: to enhance what it means to be human by giving people wings, night-sight, and other abilities; to unlock the possibilities of gender and parenthood; to cure disease and even to end mortality itself.

Everything changes when her father is captured and sentenced to death. To save him, Iriset must infiltrate the palace and the empire’s fanatical ruling family. There, she realizes she has a chance—and an obligation—to bring down the entire corrupt system. She'll have to entangle herself in the lives of the emperor and his sister, getting them to trust and even to love her. But love is a two-way street, and Iriset’s own heart holds the most mysterious and impenetrable magic of all.

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.

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~definitely siding with the criminals
~let’s fuck up biology with magic
~screw the gods
~screw everyone you like
~fantasy as a concept, queered

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

*

This book is perfect.

There are no ‘but’s*. There are only ‘and’s. ‘THIS thing is perfect and THIS thing is perfect and THIS OTHER THING ALSO.’

I will tell you about them. I will. But it’s hard. Mercy Makers is too much for me to discuss lightly; too much made for me, all my feelings for it intimate and raw and feral. Mercy Makers feels private, precious, printed in my blood on parchment made of me. As if Gratton reached into my deepest heart and spilled everything they found out onto the pages – and half of what they found I didn’t know was down there. Whispers, wishes, half-formed, wordless longings that Gratton crystallised and spun into stained glass windows, all jewels and light and breathless, hurting awe.

What do you do when someone takes everything you ever wanted – and everything you didn’t know you wanted – and makes it heart-stoppingly, stunningly, searingly beautiful before they give it back to you?

What the fuck. How dare. Who gave you the RIGHT.

Thank you.

So bear with me. I’ll do my best, but this is hard. Mercy Makers means too much to me to make this easy.

*

Here is a world that once had two moons. But one fell, and out of it came a god, and out of the god came a city, and out of the city came an empire. It is a place where everyone wears masks, to keep mages from stealing their faces; where same-sex relations are looked on benignly but any pairing that could create a pregnancy is regulated; where the ‘pope’ gives her god a spiritual orgasm every day. Graffiti moves and morphs, criminals are unmade without mercy, and healing is heresy. Silence is everything.

Here is a world.

And here is the woman who is going to break it.

Her name is Iriset, but she prefers Silk. She is a master of human architecture – using magic to alter or repair living tissue. This makes her a heretic. She doesn’t care. She’s obsessed, passionate, about the search for knowledge, about experimenting, pushing boundaries, learning. She is a hedonist, inspiringly, sublimely sensual; she is ruthless, except when she is not. She is wickedly, dangerously intelligent; she is excellent at justifying what she wants. She is manipulative, devious, and gloriously unashamed. (Of what? Everything.) She is not amoral, but she’s close, from certain angles – or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she has her own code of ethics, and it won’t always line up with yours.

shake the empire to its core because that’s what they deserve, that’s what everyone who pretends the laws of Holy Silence matter more than lives and healing and progress and science and hope and all those other things Iriset doesn’t believe in but must be better.

She’s not the linchpin, but she is the catalyst. The lit match dropped into the lake of oil.

Boom.

*

Everything about this book is perfect.

That makes it hard to know where to start.

*

Mercy Makers is incandescent, equal parts sensual and feral, thrillingly defiant of genre and societal convention alike. It is respendently, revellingly, ravishingly strange; not Weird Fiction, which is so aggressively bizarre it elicits a knee-jerk recoil from most of us, but something far more entrancing, seductive. Mercy Makers dresses itself in silken camouflage and eye-catching jewels to trick and distract you, make you think you know what it is. And so you feel safe, comfortable; and so you let your guard down; and so the strangeness seeps in to you, like dye that won’t ever wash out.

Aharté’s silver-pink moon hangs like a pearl affixed to the brocade of the sky.

Here is a jewel, sparkling: long before the book starts, the setting of Mercy Makers had four genders. How interesting! What a neat little detail, decorative and unthreatening because it is not plot-relevant.

Here is the true strangeness, subtle and easily overlooked, but subliminally ground-breaking: Iriset describes every new person she meets as masculine- or feminine-forward. She is not assuming their sex or gender; she is marking how they present, separating physical markers from gender. A ‘fem-forward’ voice is not necessarily a woman’s voice; it just registers as feminine. Someone who is strongly masculine-forward is probably a man, because if they weren’t they would be suppressing or obscuring that which reads as masculine. A body – what Iriset calls their ‘design’, or sometimes ‘outer design’ – can be masculine-forward, but if the person is wearing feminine-forward clothing, then they’re probably a woman. It’s subtle and quiet and Gratton doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it is a big deal, it’s an approach to gender and sex that is revolutionary to the one most of us are walking around with!

(This is not even close being the only groundbreaking thing Gratton does with gender in this book, and I can’t not talk about one of the others. Real quick: neopronouns are newly invented pronoun sets intended to be gender-neutral or nonbinary, and almost all of the English ones mimic she/he in spelling and pronunciation. This is a problem, because it causes a lot of people to read or hear ‘ze’ or whatever and reflexively associate it with male or female, because it looks like and rhymes with he or she. It’s hard to encounter someone, even a fictional someone, and try not to tag them male or female in your head; pronouns too close to gendered ones don’t help with resisting that reflex.

Gratton uses a/an/ans – functioning like he/his/his – for their nonbinary character in Mercy Makers, and I cannot convey to you what a galaxy-brain moment that was for this particular nonbinary bookwyrm right here. I cannot convey to you how it wrecked me, to finally be able to articulate why so many neopronouns are unsatisfying. I didn’t consciously understand this was a problem until Gratton casually solved it. My mind is blown, my eyes are full of tears, my heart is too full for words. This is a BIG DEAL, and of course it took a nonbinary writer as brilliant as Gratton to think of it.)

“I am strong enough to offer trust first.”

Then you start to realise that the culture Gratton’s created doesn’t value or treat men and women differently at all. You might think, for example, that the position of Moon-Eater’s Mistress – the head of the dominant faith – is one filled only by women; it’s the word ‘mistress’, I think, and what that means in our world. But nope: past Mistresses have been men, and in fact the current emperor wishes he’d been born second because he’d much rather be Mistress than emperor (which imperial sibling gets which role is based only on birth order). This is only one of many examples. It’s surprisingly difficult to find modern fantasy settings that aren’t at least a little bit patriarchal – comes of the writers growing up in patriarchal cultures and not scrutinising their own biases and worldbuilding enough, is my guess. And when you do come across an author who’s trying to do this, they usually forget to populate the book with enough background women to be convincing; most of us automatically make filler characters men (unless it’s a role that’s stereotypically woman-ish, like nurse or nursemaid) and when 90% of your unnamed characters are men alongside most of your main cast, your ‘the sexes are equal here’ fails to convince. Gratton has neatly skipped over both these pitfalls; the sexes are equal here, down to the tiniest details, and there are women everywhere, named and unnamed. And while many readers aren’t going to be able to articulate what it is about this setting, they are going to notice subliminally. Femme-full settings make an impact. They feel different. (And wonderful.) This is yet another way that Gratton has, quietly, flipped the tables.

“I will,” Iriset says, condemning herself to glory.

Not all of it is quiet. The jewels of the more overt worldbuilding are flawlessly cut and placed, drawing the eye and dazzling: the magic system, called architecture, with its intricate designs of four-fold forces; rainbow bees; a goddess and her wife. This is a rich, sumptuous world spilling over with wonders and strangeness, and Gratton has gone wild in creating a setting that reminds you of nowhere else, that is thrillingly original, that feels like Fantasy, capital f and all. I would even go so far as to say this isn’t merely queer fantasy; it’s queered fantasy, fantasy done different. This is what Fantasy is supposed to be: imagination that takes no prisoners, that indulges itself and revels in doing so, that has no interest at all in what is conventional, normal, expected.

The person has seven big eyes arcing across their face and forehead, each starry and bright like a different hour of the night sky between twilight and dawn.

That lack of convention continues into the precious-metal setting for all those gemmed details, parts of the book even less obvious than the worldbuilding, but easily as subversive. (Are subversive and sublime related? In Mercy Makers they are.) More readers pick up on worldbuilding than the nuances of the actual writing, though in Mercy Makers the two are closely related; the prose reinforces the worldbuilding. It’s the way Gratton writes about sex – not just unashamedly, but depicting sex as something to revel in because bodies are something to revel in, less a counter-argument to the Western ideas about sex and shame than a complete ignoring of them. It’s the language Gratton uses to describe fatness, as if fat-shaming has never been a thing at all. It’s the off-handed way in which we learn that in this setting, marriages can be between more than two people. It’s the seemingly accidental way Gratton breaks convention in their prose style: [View post to see spoiler] are such mind-reeling choices that are done so damn quietly – and that’s what makes them so mind-reeling, that’s why you reel, because Gratton wields them like scalpels and sets them off like bombs and if it had been less subtle the explosions wouldn’t have been as big.

Sheer silk and the most delicate layers of linen drape her thick, rolling body, hugging breasts and hips and belly as if that cloth were the most blessed thing in all the world for being allowed to drift so near her flesh.

And all of this is without even really touching on Iriset as a character, who is herself, quite literally, a living middle finger to convention, both in her own world (heretic, remember) and in ours, because how often are we allowed to have morally-grey, ambitious women characters who are extremely horny with none of that negating their sheer, once-in-a-generation genius? And without touching at all everything Gratton has to say about empire, and love, and mercy; about faith and heresy and not finding a kinder interpretation of religion but going fuck the gods, actually; about how everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, every single conflict in the book, can be distilled down to stagnation/stasis vs creativity/life. I could write a THESIS on all the ways sex permeates this book and the way it’s presented and someone smarter than me had better do it, because if I do it I the entire thing WILL be in caps-lock. Let me say instead, as a kind of shorthand, that Mercy Makers is the spiritual heir to Kushiel’s Dart, which is probably why they put Jacqueline Carey’s approval on the cover, as they should.

“The very existence of the Days of Mercy proves that the regular state of empire is a merciless one.”

Or the PLOT, which is Iriset-worthy (which is to say, genius). Everything in the book’s synopsis is technically accurate, but nothing plays out the way the synopsis implies it will, and I was endlessly dazzled by the way Gratton never did what I expected (yet another way this book ignores convention is in its plot-beats). This book had me anxious, breathless, furious, terrified, freaked, exulting and, at one point about halfway through, I had to put the book down and sob for about an hour (GRATTON YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID). The twists, the table-flips, and yet none of it done for shock value, all of it fitting together like an architectural marvel.

Apostasy only exists if you believe in god.

The edifice of wonder Gratton has built here is breathtaking.

(This book even manages to be funny! On top of everything else, it made me laugh! Humour is probably the hardest thing to write ever and Gratton did that as well!)

Iriset was not made for emergencies. She should be kept in a locked room with design tools and left alone.

The Mercy Makers is opulent, decadent, extravagantly strange and exquisitely lush, all velvet and crystal and sharp, broken glass. It is deeply queer and completely nonconformist. It’s inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what it inspires; there is no other book like it. It’s a glamour-bomb dropped into a genre that’s in need of a little waking up. It’s…

It is literally everything I ever wanted. I have sometimes said that in reviews before; sometimes, if I am feeling extra-brave, I have been honest enough to say, everything I ever wanted, except unicorns. Well, Mercy Makers even gave me unicorns.

the delicate unicorns fled, too intelligent to be captured, and it is possible some live in the wilds beyond the empire

Words don’t do Mercy Makers justice, so allow me to invent a new one for it: irisedent.

(Nobody tell Iriset, I can only imagine how smug she’d be to have inspired a new adjective!)

irisedent/ˈɪrɪsɛdɛnt/ adjective
1. Relating to or characteristic of Iriset mé Isidor; genius; mind-blowing; perfection.

Irisedent. Sublime, subversive, scintillating. The best book of the year; easily one of the best books of the decade. Or maybe it’s quicker to just say: everything.

This book is EVERYTHING.

And it’s out next Tuesday. Go preorder it IMMEDIATELY.

*But so many butts. :D :D :D

The post What Fantasy Is Supposed to Be: The Mercy Makers by Tessa Gratton appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

What Fantasy Is Supposed to Be: The Mercy Makers by Tessa Gratton

The Mercy Makers (The Moon Heresies, #1) by Tessa Gratton
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual brown MC, secondary brown sapphic character, minor nonbinary character, minor trans character, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, present-tense
Published on: 17th June 2025
ISBN: B0DJLTYMKR
Goodreads

A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love—either way, her choice will upend the world, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.

Can an empire trip and fall on a mere strand of silk?

Iriset is a prodigy and an outlaw. The daughter of a powerful criminal, she dons her alter ego Silk to create magical disguises for those in her father’s organization, but she longs to do more with her talent: to enhance what it means to be human by giving people wings, night-sight, and other abilities; to unlock the possibilities of gender and parenthood; to cure disease and even to end mortality itself.

Everything changes when her father is captured and sentenced to death. To save him, Iriset must infiltrate the palace and the empire’s fanatical ruling family. There, she realizes she has a chance—and an obligation—to bring down the entire corrupt system. She'll have to entangle herself in the lives of the emperor and his sister, getting them to trust and even to love her. But love is a two-way street, and Iriset’s own heart holds the most mysterious and impenetrable magic of all.

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.

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~definitely siding with the criminals
~let’s fuck up biology with magic
~screw the gods
~screw everyone you like
~fantasy as a concept, queered

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

*

This book is perfect.

There are no ‘but’s*. There are only ‘and’s. ‘THIS thing is perfect and THIS thing is perfect and THIS OTHER THING ALSO.’

I will tell you about them. I will. But it’s hard. Mercy Makers is too much for me to discuss lightly; too much made for me, all my feelings for it intimate and raw and feral. Mercy Makers feels private, precious, printed in my blood on parchment made of me. As if Gratton reached into my deepest heart and spilled everything they found out onto the pages – and half of what they found I didn’t know was down there. Whispers, wishes, half-formed, wordless longings that Gratton crystallised and spun into stained glass windows, all jewels and light and breathless, hurting awe.

What do you do when someone takes everything you ever wanted – and everything you didn’t know you wanted – and makes it heart-stoppingly, stunningly, searingly beautiful before they give it back to you?

What the fuck. How dare. Who gave you the RIGHT.

Thank you.

So bear with me. I’ll do my best, but this is hard. Mercy Makers means too much to me to make this easy.

*

Here is a world that once had two moons. But one fell, and out of it came a god, and out of the god came a city, and out of the city came an empire. It is a place where everyone wears masks, to keep mages from stealing their faces; where same-sex relations are looked on benignly but any pairing that could create a pregnancy is regulated; where the ‘pope’ gives her god a spiritual orgasm every day. Graffiti moves and morphs, criminals are unmade without mercy, and healing is heresy. Silence is everything.

Here is a world.

And here is the woman who is going to break it.

Her name is Iriset, but she prefers Silk. She is a master of human architecture – using magic to alter or repair living tissue. This makes her a heretic. She doesn’t care. She’s obsessed, passionate, about the search for knowledge, about experimenting, pushing boundaries, learning. She is a hedonist, inspiringly, sublimely sensual; she is ruthless, except when she is not. She is wickedly, dangerously intelligent; she is excellent at justifying what she wants. She is manipulative, devious, and gloriously unashamed. (Of what? Everything.) She is not amoral, but she’s close, from certain angles – or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she has her own code of ethics, and it won’t always line up with yours.

shake the empire to its core because that’s what they deserve, that’s what everyone who pretends the laws of Holy Silence matter more than lives and healing and progress and science and hope and all those other things Iriset doesn’t believe in but must be better.

She’s not the linchpin, but she is the catalyst. The lit match dropped into the lake of oil.

Boom.

*

Everything about this book is perfect.

That makes it hard to know where to start.

*

Mercy Makers is incandescent, equal parts sensual and feral, thrillingly defiant of genre and societal convention alike. It is respendently, revellingly, ravishingly strange; not Weird Fiction, which is so aggressively bizarre it elicits a knee-jerk recoil from most of us, but something far more entrancing, seductive. Mercy Makers dresses itself in silken camouflage and eye-catching jewels to trick and distract you, make you think you know what it is. And so you feel safe, comfortable; and so you let your guard down; and so the strangeness seeps in to you, like dye that won’t ever wash out.

Aharté’s silver-pink moon hangs like a pearl affixed to the brocade of the sky.

Here is a jewel, sparkling: long before the book starts, the setting of Mercy Makers had four genders. How interesting! What a neat little detail, decorative and unthreatening because it is not plot-relevant.

Here is the true strangeness, subtle and easily overlooked, but subliminally ground-breaking: Iriset describes every new person she meets as masculine- or feminine-forward. She is not assuming their sex or gender; she is marking how they present, separating physical markers from gender. A ‘fem-forward’ voice is not necessarily a woman’s voice; it just registers as feminine. Someone who is strongly masculine-forward is probably a man, because if they weren’t they would be suppressing or obscuring that which reads as masculine. A body – what Iriset calls their ‘design’, or sometimes ‘outer design’ – can be masculine-forward, but if the person is wearing feminine-forward clothing, then they’re probably a woman. It’s subtle and quiet and Gratton doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it is a big deal, it’s an approach to gender and sex that is revolutionary to the one most of us are walking around with!

(This is not even close being the only groundbreaking thing Gratton does with gender in this book, and I can’t not talk about one of the others. Real quick: neopronouns are newly invented pronoun sets intended to be gender-neutral or nonbinary, and almost all of the English ones mimic she/he in spelling and pronunciation. This is a problem, because it causes a lot of people to read or hear ‘ze’ or whatever and reflexively associate it with male or female, because it looks like and rhymes with he or she. It’s hard to encounter someone, even a fictional someone, and try not to tag them male or female in your head; pronouns too close to gendered ones don’t help with resisting that reflex.

Gratton uses a/an/ans – functioning like he/his/his – for their nonbinary character in Mercy Makers, and I cannot convey to you what a galaxy-brain moment that was for this particular nonbinary bookwyrm right here. I cannot convey to you how it wrecked me, to finally be able to articulate why so many neopronouns are unsatisfying. I didn’t consciously understand this was a problem until Gratton casually solved it. My mind is blown, my eyes are full of tears, my heart is too full for words. This is a BIG DEAL, and of course it took a nonbinary writer as brilliant as Gratton to think of it.)

“I am strong enough to offer trust first.”

Then you start to realise that the culture Gratton’s created doesn’t value or treat men and women differently at all. You might think, for example, that the position of Moon-Eater’s Mistress – the head of the dominant faith – is one filled only by women; it’s the word ‘mistress’, I think, and what that means in our world. But nope: past Mistresses have been men, and in fact the current emperor wishes he’d been born second because he’d much rather be Mistress than emperor (which imperial sibling gets which role is based only on birth order). This is only one of many examples. It’s surprisingly difficult to find modern fantasy settings that aren’t at least a little bit patriarchal – comes of the writers growing up in patriarchal cultures and not scrutinising their own biases and worldbuilding enough, is my guess. And when you do come across an author who’s trying to do this, they usually forget to populate the book with enough background women to be convincing; most of us automatically make filler characters men (unless it’s a role that’s stereotypically woman-ish, like nurse or nursemaid) and when 90% of your unnamed characters are men alongside most of your main cast, your ‘the sexes are equal here’ fails to convince. Gratton has neatly skipped over both these pitfalls; the sexes are equal here, down to the tiniest details, and there are women everywhere, named and unnamed. And while many readers aren’t going to be able to articulate what it is about this setting, they are going to notice subliminally. Femme-full settings make an impact. They feel different. (And wonderful.) This is yet another way that Gratton has, quietly, flipped the tables.

“I will,” Iriset says, condemning herself to glory.

Not all of it is quiet. The jewels of the more overt worldbuilding are flawlessly cut and placed, drawing the eye and dazzling: the magic system, called architecture, with its intricate designs of four-fold forces; rainbow bees; a goddess and her wife. This is a rich, sumptuous world spilling over with wonders and strangeness, and Gratton has gone wild in creating a setting that reminds you of nowhere else, that is thrillingly original, that feels like Fantasy, capital f and all. I would even go so far as to say this isn’t merely queer fantasy; it’s queered fantasy, fantasy done different. This is what Fantasy is supposed to be: imagination that takes no prisoners, that indulges itself and revels in doing so, that has no interest at all in what is conventional, normal, expected.

The person has seven big eyes arcing across their face and forehead, each starry and bright like a different hour of the night sky between twilight and dawn.

That lack of convention continues into the precious-metal setting for all those gemmed details, parts of the book even less obvious than the worldbuilding, but easily as subversive. (Are subversive and sublime related? In Mercy Makers they are.) More readers pick up on worldbuilding than the nuances of the actual writing, though in Mercy Makers the two are closely related; the prose reinforces the worldbuilding. It’s the way Gratton writes about sex – not just unashamedly, but depicting sex as something to revel in because bodies are something to revel in, less a counter-argument to the Western ideas about sex and shame than a complete ignoring of them. It’s the language Gratton uses to describe fatness, as if fat-shaming has never been a thing at all. It’s the off-handed way in which we learn that in this setting, marriages can be between more than two people. It’s the seemingly accidental way Gratton breaks convention in their prose style: [View post to see spoiler] are such mind-reeling choices that are done so damn quietly – and that’s what makes them so mind-reeling, that’s why you reel, because Gratton wields them like scalpels and sets them off like bombs and if it had been less subtle the explosions wouldn’t have been as big.

Sheer silk and the most delicate layers of linen drape her thick, rolling body, hugging breasts and hips and belly as if that cloth were the most blessed thing in all the world for being allowed to drift so near her flesh.

And all of this is without even really touching on Iriset as a character, who is herself, quite literally, a living middle finger to convention, both in her own world (heretic, remember) and in ours, because how often are we allowed to have morally-grey, ambitious women characters who are extremely horny with none of that negating their sheer, once-in-a-generation genius? And without touching at all everything Gratton has to say about empire, and love, and mercy; about faith and heresy and not finding a kinder interpretation of religion but going fuck the gods, actually; about how everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, every single conflict in the book, can be distilled down to stagnation/stasis vs creativity/life. I could write a THESIS on all the ways sex permeates this book and the way it’s presented and someone smarter than me had better do it, because if I do it I the entire thing WILL be in caps-lock. Let me say instead, as a kind of shorthand, that Mercy Makers is the spiritual heir to Kushiel’s Dart, which is probably why they put Jacqueline Carey’s approval on the cover, as they should.

“The very existence of the Days of Mercy proves that the regular state of empire is a merciless one.”

Or the PLOT, which is Iriset-worthy (which is to say, genius). Everything in the book’s synopsis is technically accurate, but nothing plays out the way the synopsis implies it will, and I was endlessly dazzled by the way Gratton never did what I expected (yet another way this book ignores convention is in its plot-beats). This book had me anxious, breathless, furious, terrified, freaked, exulting and, at one point about halfway through, I had to put the book down and sob for about an hour (GRATTON YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID). The twists, the table-flips, and yet none of it done for shock value, all of it fitting together like an architectural marvel.

Apostasy only exists if you believe in god.

The edifice of wonder Gratton has built here is breathtaking.

(This book even manages to be funny! On top of everything else, it made me laugh! Humour is probably the hardest thing to write ever and Gratton did that as well!)

Iriset was not made for emergencies. She should be kept in a locked room with design tools and left alone.

The Mercy Makers is opulent, decadent, extravagantly strange and exquisitely lush, all velvet and crystal and sharp, broken glass. It is deeply queer and completely nonconformist. It’s inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what it inspires; there is no other book like it. It’s a glamour-bomb dropped into a genre that’s in need of a little waking up. It’s…

It is literally everything I ever wanted. I have sometimes said that in reviews before; sometimes, if I am feeling extra-brave, I have been honest enough to say, everything I ever wanted, except unicorns. Well, Mercy Makers even gave me unicorns.

the delicate unicorns fled, too intelligent to be captured, and it is possible some live in the wilds beyond the empire

Words don’t do Mercy Makers justice, so allow me to invent a new one for it: irisedent.

(Nobody tell Iriset, I can only imagine how smug she’d be to have inspired a new adjective!)

irisedent/ˈɪrɪsɛdɛnt/ adjective
1. Relating to or characteristic of Iriset mé Isidor; genius; mind-blowing; perfection.

Irisedent. Sublime, subversive, scintillating. The best book of the year; easily one of the best books of the decade. Or maybe it’s quicker to just say: everything.

This book is EVERYTHING.

And it’s out next Tuesday. Go preorder it IMMEDIATELY.

*But so many butts. :D :D :D

The post What Fantasy Is Supposed to Be: The Mercy Makers by Tessa Gratton appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…A Light From the Nether by Molly Dowd Sullivan

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

You can find the releases I’m most anticipating this year over on my Unmissable list, but I use Can’t-Wait Wednesday to feature books I’m hopeful about but aren’t as sure of.

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is A Light From the Nether by Molly Dowd Sullivan!

A Light From the Nether by Molly Dowd Sullivan
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Representation: Gay MC
Published on: 18th June 2025
Goodreads

Molly Dowd Sullivan marks her debut with a thrilling urban fantasy novel that grabs you and won't let go. Dark elements of psychic infection, body horror, trauma, and tragic love play against the backdrop of a compelling murder mystery. For fans of A Song of Achilles, CS Pacat, and Stephen King.

Liam O'Connor is special. When a Fissure opens in someone's mind, he's the one who sews it up again. When a parasite creeps through that Fissure, Liam is the exterminator who purges it. And when Liam loses everything, he's the coward who runs. But when he moves to an old house in coastal New England, hoping for isolation, something from his past follows. Fissures start tearing open; minds are devoured. People die. It's not long before Liam realizes a murderer has come to Shoalport, and he's the only one who can stop them.

Well, him, and the man who keeps haunting his dreams.

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I am thrilled by how weird this sounds: fissures in people’s MINDS? A fissure to WHAT? Somewhere monster-y things live, I guess! I saw it mentioned in an early review that some of the beasties eat trauma, which a) is fantastic, b) begs the question: does that work as a cure for PTSD? and c) makes me wonder what OTHER things the monsters might eat???

And what does that DO to you, if one of these things eats your trauma (or whatever else)? Presumably it’s not good, since if it were you wouldn’t need or want exterminators…

The romance is apparently not at all the focus of the story; instead, it’s supposed to be a mix of cosmic body horror, urban fantasy, and historical? I don’t know how historical fits in with this premise, but I am EAGER to find out!

And I should find out soon, because the book comes out next week!

The post I Can’t Wait For…A Light From the Nether by Molly Dowd Sullivan appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Must-Have Monday #240

Must-Have Monday is a feature highlighting which of the coming week’s new releases I’m excited for. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all books being published that week; only those I’m interested in out of those I’m aware of! The focus is diverse SFF, but other stuff sneaks in occasionally too.

FOURTEEN books this week!

(Books are listed in order of pub date, then Adult SFF, Adult Other, YA SFF, YA Other, MG SFF.)

The Witch Roads (The Witch Roads, #1) by Kate Elliott
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Bisexual MC, major trans character
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned.

When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen―once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall―is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination.

When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered.

The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?

The Witch Roads is the latest epic novel by fan favorite, Kate Elliott.

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One of the most incredibly addictive books I’ve read in a WHILE! Even if the synopsis doesn’t sound like your thing, I urge you to give it a try – it didn’t sound like my thing either, but I ended up not able to put the book down!

You can read an excerpt here!

My review!

Flight of the Fallen (Magebike Courier #2) by Hana Lee
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Science Fantasy
Representation: East Asian-coded cast, bi/pansexual MC, bi/pansexual MC, dyslexic MC, polyamory
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

Hana Lee’s gritty, queer Mad Max–inspired fantasy duology concludes with more high-stakes political intrigue, monsters of all kinds, and a high-speed motorcycle adventure to find a refuge for humanity beyond the wasteland.

Jin-Lu should be happy. Princess Yi-Nereen of Kerina Rut and Prince Kadrin of Kerina Sol have reunited after twelve long years, having survived a near-apocalypse. They are safe and in love—thanks to Jin—and they want her to join them for their upcoming nuptials in Kerina Sol.

But their happy ending came at the cost of Jin’s.

Jin lost everything in the fallout of saving the world. Now she’s Talentless, scrabbling to eke out a living in the lowest echelons of society. All she wants is to be left alone with her shameful secret, but the storms that sweep the wastes have other plans.

When refugees from a fallen city flood into Kerina Sol, the delicate balance between Talented and Talentless shatters. With tensions rising and civil war looming, Yi-Nereen, Kadrin, and Jin must join forces again to save their own people and the refugees.

Now their salvation lies beyond the wastes, in the mythical home of the the First City.

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This is such a WILDLY unique setting – post-apocalyptic science fantasy? – and I’m really hoping we get answers to some of the mysteries introduced in the first book!

You can read an excerpt here (below the About The Book section)!

My review of book one, Road to Ruin!

The Wicked + The Divine Compendium by Kieron Gillen
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Black MC, BIPOC, queer, and QBIPOC cast
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

“The Wicked + The Divine is about art, creativity and living to the fullest, but mainly about death.” —USA Today

The critically acclaimed, compulsively page-turning, urban fantasy series returns in its definitive edition, collecting the complete story in one binge-ready volume.

Every ninety years, twelve gods incarnate as humans. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are dead.

A world where gods are the ultimate pop stars and pop stars are the ultimate gods. But remember: just because you’re immortal, doesn’t mean you’re going to live forever.

The critical and commercial smash by the team behind Young Avengers and PHONOGRAM has its entire story collected in this single volume.

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If you, like me, read a little of The Wicked + The Divine but didn’t keep up with it – or if you’ve never read it at all – or if you love the series and want a 1000+ page omnibus of it – then ta da! This is the COMPLETE series in one ENORMOUS book, and I WILL be pouncing on it! (It’s also available as an ebook, which will probably be much easier to carry around!)

Epsilon Nine (Twin Suns Book 2) by Olive J. Kelley
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Trans MC
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

Six months after the attack on Adrestia, trans activist Juno Marcus finds her revolution at a standstill—they've been forced into hiding, only leaving the uncharted planet they call home to participate in protests as the Galactic Presidential Election grows near. But, when she and girlfriend Castor Quasar are torn apart in a riot, she finds herself directed to safety by a mysterious, anonymous signal—a transmission only signed as EPSILON 09.

However, while revolution moves quick, the galaxy moves quicker, and Juno and the rest of the rebels find themselves embroiled in conflict after conflict—a once-green planet ravaged by spilled oil, a fundraising gala that ends in blood, and a threat that forces Castor to confront old wounds. As the election grows nearer every day and messages from EPSILON containing impossible intel grow more frequent, Juno starts to question everything she thought she knew. Is she doing enough? Is the galaxy's democracy still worth saving?

Or is it time to burn it all down and build something new from the ashes?

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It is PAST time I started reading this series, hopefully the release of book two will help me start book one!

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MCs
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532.
London, 1837.
Boston, 2019.

Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots.

One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild.

And all of them grow teeth.

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I’ve been promised toxic sapphic vampires with the vibes of the Interview With the Vampire tv show, which is an extremely high bar, but one I hope Bury Us clears! I need something to read until IWtV season three…!

You can read an excerpt here – and another one here!

A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

How do you solve a murder that hasn't happened yet?

Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first place!

After she decodes the invitation’s hidden message with ease, the promise of her family secrets being revealed is too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for one another.

Their newly arrived guest proves to be just as much an enigma to them as they are to her. While Destiny slowly works to unravel the mysteries hidden throughout the ominous castle, she struggles to interpret disturbing nightly visions of what is to come. In the midst of cryptic ciphers, hidden passages, and the family’s magical heritage and line of succession, Destiny is certain of two things: one of the Scruffmores is going to die and she’s running out of time to stop it.
Interspersed with riddles and puzzles that both Destiny and the reader must solve, A Most Puzzling Murder is a one-of-a-kind mystery that will leave you guessing and gasping until the very last page!

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I came across this one when I looked up the author in relation to another of her books, Witches of Moonshyne Manor – and discovered that I definitely wanted to read this one as well! This seems to be the kind of interactive mystery I haven’t engaged with before – you can email a main character for hints re puzzles you have to solve to continue, there’s apparently choose your own adventure elements… I’m intrigued!

We Can Never Leave by H.E. Edgmon
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: Nonbinary MC, queer MC
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

Sweet Tooth meets The Raven Boys in this queer young adult contemporary fantasy about what it means to belong from H.E. Edgmon.

You can never go home…

Every day, all across the world, inhuman creatures are waking up with no memory of who they are or where they came from–and the Caravan exists to help them. The traveling community is made up of these very creatures and their families who’ve acclimated to this new existence by finding refuge in each other. That is, until the morning five teenage travelers wake to find their community has disappeared around them overnight.

Those left: a half-human who only just ran back to the Caravan with their tail between their legs, two brothers–one who can’t seem to stay out of trouble and the other who’s never been brave enough to get in it, a venomous girl with blood on her hands and a heart of gold, and the Caravan’s newest addition, a disquieting shadow in the shape of a boy. They’ll have to work together to figure out what happened the night of the disappearance, but each one of the forsaken five is white-knuckling their own secrets. And with each truth forced to light, it becomes clear this isn’t really about what happened to their people–it’s about what happened to them.

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I DNFed my early copy of this one; it’s the wrong flavour of dark for me, and I found it very slow. But if you like your teens toxic and your darkness a bit more surreal, with the overall vibe more dreamy, then you might have a better time with it than I did!

You can read an excerpt here!

The Incorruptibles (The Incorruptibles, #1) by Lauren Magaziner
Genres: Fantasy, MG, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC, queer secondary characters
Published on: 10th June 2025
Goodreads

A girl joins the human resistance against sorcerer tyranny in this first book in the exciting upper middle grade fantasy series The Incorruptibles that’s Keeper of the Lost Cities meets The Marvellers.

Fiora Barrowling lives in a world where sorcerers rule over humans. After surviving an encounter with The Radiance—the very worst of the sorcerers—she’s whisked away to the incredible Incorruptibles (“Inc”) Academy, a school for resistance fighters in training. But most of the other students think Fiora hasn’t earned her place there, and when things start to go wrong and it seems the sorcerers have a spy in the academy, all eyes are on Fiora. With all odds stacked against her, can Fiora prove that she belongs?

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The author’s mentioned that EIGHT of the cast are queer, including the MC, and that the ‘house’ system of her magic school has the students choosing their houses, not any external force. I like the sound of that!

Wars in Wonderland by E.J. Pepino
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Portal Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F
Published on: 11th June 2025
Goodreads

At only seven years old, Alice’s nightmares began. She was plagued with visions of adventure and torture no child should have to endure. But that's all they were, nightmares. Until now. Twenty years later, the rabbit has returned to take her back and Alice finds herself face to face with the very creatures she thought weren’t real. Struggling as her reality comes crashing down around her, she meets Red.

Red will do anything to get her revenge on the monster who took her world away. She's spent years trying to kill him. But when she finds herself with two sirens who never wanted anything to do with a human before, she has something to lose again. Her efforts slowed and became stagnant. Enter Alice; the one person who can help her enact her revenge. Her spark for vengeance reignites.

Will this path they’re about to embark on be worth the risks?

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I’m not usually interested in Alice in Wonderland retellings, but I’m willing to take a peek at this one.

Unconventional Love: Anthology on the Expanse of Love (Love Anthologies) by Effie Joe Stock, Nathaniel Luscombe
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: (Some) queer MCs
Published on: 12th June 2025
Goodreads

Familial. Romantic. Platonic.

Love is but one word struggling to encompass a wide variety of emotions, connections, relationships. This anthology seeks to sail the vastness of love’s expanse and discover all the many ways humans love and are loved.

From loving your partner as a worm, to a love letter from a daughter to mother, to faun and mergirl lovers separated by culture, to a telepathic friendship nearly cast away, Unconventional Love is a collection like no other, bringing together hearts and emotions scattered across a universe so fast and an even greater love.

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I hope these stories are genuinely boundary-pushing/thought-provoking, because I’ve been longing for something like this for ages!

Cage of Starlight by Jules Arbeaux
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Ace-spectrum M/M
Published on: 12th June 2025
Goodreads

Don't make waves, don't get attached, and never let anyone see the tattoos.

Those rules have kept Tory Arknett alive, alone, and on the run for years in a country eager to put his healing hands to the work of war. When a desperate display of magic outs him to the authorities, Tory flees—right into the hands of cold and competent Sena Vantaras.

Caged in a cruel training facility and threatened with placement on the front lines of a brutal war, Tory needs to get out before he gets dead.

There’s just one thing to do before he goes: make Sena pay.

But when a mission strands them in enemy territory, they'll have to work together to survive. As they learn more about each other and the myth behind the magic that connects them, Tory and Sena find belonging with each other. But the trackers the facility has implanted in them will kill them in three days if they don't go back. Soon, Tory and Sena face a desperate decision: their freedom, or their lives?

A grumpy healer must work with his captor when a mission strands them in enemy territory in this action-packed, queer romantic fantasy by the author of Lord of the Empty Isles.

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Arbeaux’s debut was great, and I’m even more excited for their sophomore novel!

Reignclowd Palace: A Cosy, Craft-Filled Fantasy with Magic, Dragons, and Secrets by Philippa Rice
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 12th June 2025
Goodreads

'Once you’ve entered the world of the artist Philippa Rice, you’ll never want to leave' Charlotte Runcie, The Telegraph

Pre-order the cosy, craft-filled fantasy where magic is in every ornate palace corridor and cobblestoned street . . .

--Evnie Treedle makes magical things and for the last few years she has been selling them in magical knickknacks shop, the Magpie Nest.

But everything changes when one day Evnie’s crafting abilities catch the attention of the nearby Reignclowd Palace. She is asked to become their resident spellsmith… the original spellsmith suddenly ill under mysterious circumstances.

Evnie is soon put to work making and mending magical objects. Yet, problems start to appear when she realises there’s much more at stake than friendship or romance; a dragon looms over the kingdom looking for a soul to devour, and it’s eyes are set on their princess.
--
'Rice is immensely talented and versatile who works with sculpture and textiles and collage, and that smorgasbord of knowledge transmutes into her work' Zainab Akhtar - Comics & Cola

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Pretty sure this is a UK-only release at the moment (although I think you can get the ebook through US Amazon?) but I’m so enchanted by that premise that I will be jumping through the necessary hoops to get my hands on a copy! (Also, we can apparently expect a lot of knitting!)

Damsels and Dinosaurs by Wren Jones
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Secondary World No Magic
Representation: F/F
Published on: 13th June 2025
Goodreads

Poppy Fletcher is not just a society heiress (she is— of the famous Fletcher Honey Company) set to marry the wealthiest man in London (the heir of a tea empire with the personality of chamomile). No, Poppy fancies herself a journalist... in spirit, at least.

When her family’s honey empire begins to crumble, Poppy stows away to her aunt’s secretive island, hoping to (somehow) solve the mystery behind the why the bees stopped producing and escape her looming nuptials (by any means necessary).

She expected to find a mystery. She did not expect actual, living dinosaurs (abnormally tiny, adorable dinosaurs).

She also didn’t expect her family to send her betrothed’s cousin (Athena, Poppy’s Very Secret and Very Grumpy Ex) to retrieve her there.

Everything’s perfectly under control.

(Probably).

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Honestly, you put a dinosaur in a cute hat on your cover and that’s it, I’m sold. I’m easy like that!

Son of the Moon Book 1: Serendipity by Janelle Cressida
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: MLM MC, MLM East Asian MC, M/M
Published on: 13th June 2025
Goodreads

"Don't come crying to me if he somehow manages to actually kill you!"

Twenty-one-year-old Jesse leads a pretty ordinary life until he encounters Jamie, who, covered in soot and ash, can't even remember where the blood on his hands came from.

Aware of the risk, Jesse offers him a place for the night, and what starts as simple act of kindness quickly deepens into a profound connection. Jamie explores the world anew, curious and with an endearing innocence, but things change rapidly when their first intimate moment nearly ends in tragedy. Even worse, Jamie begins to experience vivid nightmares; and discovering mysterious powers inside of him, the question of who he really is becomes all the more pressing. What did he do before he met Jesse? Is Jamie truly the harmless person he seems to be?

Dive in to the beginning of a unique love story that is filled with unexpected twists and turns, a story that will change the world forever.

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The early reviews of this have been very positive but light on detail about the story itself, so I don’t know what to expect of this one!

Will you be reading any of these? Did I miss any releases you think I should know about? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #240 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Mini-Review: The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott

The Witch Roads (The Witch Roads, #1) by Kate Elliott
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MC, major trans character
Published on: 10th June 2025
ISBN: 125033862X
Goodreads

Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned.

When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen―once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall―is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination.

When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered.

The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?

The Witch Roads is the latest epic novel by fan favorite, Kate Elliott.

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.

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Listen, I could sit here and tell you that I found the prose kind of clunky occasionally; that sometimes things are awkwardly phrased, or here and there a sentence is a few beats too long to fit the rhythm of a paragraph. I could nitpick all day.

But absolutely NONE of that matters, because The Witch Roads is deliciously, compulsively readable; it’s a book that reaches out and grabs you. When I picked this up, I was stressed to the max; I was moving house, which was all the usual kinds of stressful plus managing our very freaked-out pets; I was terribly ill; and it was the middle of winter, which where I am is Extreme and Extremely Depressing.

(We’re not gonna talk about how smart it was to pick up a nearly 600 page doorstopper in the middle of all this, ‘kay? Kay.)

And in the midst of this – all of this! – I was GLUED to the pages. Fellow readers, I devoured The Witch Roads in three days. Three days of doing everything that needed doing on fast-forward so that I could get back to Elen and the adventure she Did Not Ask For, Thanks A Lot. AND I REGRET NOTHING!

It’s really difficult for me to put my finger on what it is that makes this book so impossibly addictive. Kate Elliott has always been extremely hit or miss for me, and a big part of it is definitely mood or timing – if I’m not in the right headspace (whatever mysterious headspace is required; I can’t identify it) I bounce off her books; but when the stars align, her stories enchant me. But the stars should not have aligned for this one! Not right then! It was the worst possible moment for me to pick up a new Elliott book (again, let’s not get into wtf I was thinking; I do not remember and it’s probably better that way).

AND YET.

Unputdownable. I resented having to sleep! Witch Roads demanded priority, which was very unfortunate timing, but that just didn’t matter.

(Thank all the gods I have such an understanding partner. The things he has to put up with!)

Elen is not your typical fantasy heroine; she is extremely practical, treasures what she has and doesn’t let herself dream of more, has pride in herself but isn’t bothered by others looking down on her. Optimistic would suggest she always expects the best to happen, and she doesn’t, but she is so appreciative of the good things in her life, the small pleasures and small beauties she encounters. I really loved that about her. There is something extremely soothing about her personality; she has a very calming influence, even from beyond the page. In an emergency, she’s exactly who you’d want by your side, both because she’s very competent at anything she sets her hands to, and because she always keeps her head.

Elliott makes it quietly clear, through small asides and subtle blink-and-you’ll-miss-them revelations, that Elen – and her now-deceased sister – have a Mysterious Backstory. Brace yourself for some serious twists, because although Elliott sets you up to think you know what that backstory is, you will be completely wrong. It’s the best bait-and-switch reveal I’ve encountered in a while, and when all the pieces actually come together, it’s with a galaxy-brain moment that makes the wait for it more than worth it!

Quite a lot of the book is like that: there are a number of distinct but intertwined plotlines, taking place across wildly varied scales – and none of them are simple, or obvious, or quick to explain themselves. Elliott drip-feeds us information, and it feels like playing chess with a master. Perhaps in the hands of another storyteller, this could have been drawn-out or annoying, but there’s too much going on right in front of us at every moment – the travails of the journey Elen and the prince are on – for things to feel slow or boring. Elen is so viscerally present, both to us on the page, and in living every moment she has, for us to ever feel divorced from the story. It doesn’t hurt at all that the rest of the cast is wonderfully vibrant too: most especially Kem, Elen’s trans nephew, and the being possessing the prince, who we definitely should not trust but damn, he’s charming!

The empire Elliott has created has a very mild trace of ancient China, with all of its citizens fitted into an immense, hyper-strict hierarchy, much of which is taken up by an extensive bureaucracy. But this is a land beset by Spore, outbreaks of magical spores that horrifically mutate all living matter; where carriages bearing the imperial family are drawn by panthers; and griffin-riders carry the most urgent messages back and forth. Ancient ruins, prehistoric skeletons, and glimpsed non-humans give the setting an immense weight of history without any need to info-dump the reader. But if you’ve read anything of Kate Elliott’s, you already know she’s a top-tier worldbuilder!

If you’re at all tuned in to the marketing around this one, you’ve probably heard that Witch Roads is the book that made Elliott fall in love with writing again. I think that comes through beautifully; it’s as much fun to read as it apparently was to write, has a magic to it that is immediately enthralling. On paper, Witch Roads shouldn’t have interested me much; if I’d been told the whole of the plot, it wouldn’t have sounded like my sort of thing at all. But I’ve already told you how unbelievably and instantly hooked I was, and I challenge anyone not to be.

Easily one of the highlights of 2025!

The post Mini-Review: The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.