One of the things I said about The Bone Raiders, the first book in Jackson Ford’s Rakada series, was that you could go ahead and judge it by its cover. The cover of that book was five badass women of color, draped in human bones and carrying weapons, plus a giant, fire-breathing lizard that is not technically a dragon but may as well be.
I am tempted to point out that this cover features two fire-breathing lizards, hit “Publish,” and retire for the night.
I fucking loved the first book, about a group of raiders in a heavily Mongolian-inspired steppe setting, who decided to try and tame the aforementioned fire-breathing lizards so that they could ride them into battle. By the time this book begins, they have mastered taming said fire-breathing lizards (which are called araatan, by the way) and all four of them have their own. Which means that the psychic crazy lady from the first book who thinks she’s immortal until she makes good on a deal she made with God now rides a dragon.
Its name is Sponge Bath. I’m not sure there are sponges in this world. I definitely don’t care. Ford can have that little anachronism for free. Two others are Tooth Monster and Princess. The fourth’s name is a plot point and I won’t reveal it.
And then the araatan start getting sick, and all four women have the same vision at the same time, featuring the words “You can save them,” and we’re off to the fucking races.
Jackson Ford is so good that it makes me sick. My jealousy is off the charts; this shit is simply not fair. I’m coming off several books in a row that didn’t hit the way I wanted them to and I needed my ass kicked, and I’m glad I saved this book for when I needed my ass kicked, because damn. Somehow a book about four women wearing bones and riding dragons also gets way deeper into everyone’s character than the first one did, and the ending is so crushing that I didn’t believe it at first, fully expecting a particular plot development to let one character hit the reset button on everything that had happened, and … nope. If you are a crier, in addition to kicking your ass, this book will make you cry, and you won’t see it coming. I am not a crier and it still almost got me.
Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and betrayal and violence and possession and gods. Because like hell we’re not going to up the stakes on this one.
This was one of the most purely fun movies I’ve seen in a while.
I had an epic Labor Day weekend, y’all. Got two projects done around the house that needed doing. Read two and a half entire books. Took naps. And, wonder of wonders, last night my wife and I watched a movie.
This movie has been out for a while, and I’m far from convinced that my opinion matters at this point, but I think if you’ve ever played D&D in your life you probably owe it to yourself to give this a watch. If you never played D&D or are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy genre in general, I’m not sure how well it will hit with you– the interesting thing to me is that the harder the movie leaned into the Forgotten Realms setting, the less I liked it. For some reason, references to Baldur’s Gate kept tossing me out of the movie, and Elminster himself makes an appearance that just felt weirdly inappropriate. It’s rare that I think something should have been more generic, but at least for me this movie could have been pulled out of the Realms and dropped into its own setting and I would have been fine with it.
That’s my only complaint, though. Everything else I have to say is positive. The cast is excellent across the board; I’ve never had any particular feelings about Chris Pine one way or another but he’s perfectly cast as a bard, and Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian character is a lot of fun as well. Everyone is really pretty and I feel like the director had a goal with the cast to push back a little bit on the idea that fantasy fiction has to be white– there are a ton of racially-ambiguous brown people in this movie, and Pine’s Ed is in an interracial marriage, and their daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, is freaking adorable. Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as a slimy con man, the villain is creepy as fuck, and in general the group dynamics make you feel like everyone had a lot of fun making this movie. The movie isn’t precisely a comedy but where it’s funny it’s funny, and the action sequences were genuinely awesome. There’s a bit at about the 1/3 mark where Rodriguez’ Holga character wins a fight with a paving stone she pries out of the road at her feet, and her fights are always full of improvised weaponry and creativity. They’re amazing, and there’s never any question about what’s going on. I wasn’t expecting action this well-shot from this movie, and it was great to see. Bigger action directors should learn from it, honestly.
Plus? Owlbears. Gelatinous Cubes. Freakin’ displacer beasts. A fat dragon. If they’d found a place to stuff a Hook Horror into the movie they’d have hit nearly all of my favorite D&D monsters. If you thought for even a minute that you might enjoy this, give it a watch while it’s on Netflix. Thumbs way up.
It was another long day— I’m still having a great time with this new group of kids, mind you, but seven classes in a row is gonna take a toll– and I want to play video games. So I’m just going to throw a quick book question at everyone and take the night off.
If you pick up Book Three of a trilogy, and it’s significantly shorter– like, a couple hundred pages shorter– than Book One and Book Two, do you feel like that’s a sign that the author has lost interest in the story? Asking because that actually happened today and my reaction upon seeing the book was “Dude, are you serious?”
I have read three of Jay Kristoff’s books prior to this series. I read his Nevernight series back-to-back-to-back and it ended up being my favorite thing I read that year. When I finished reading Nevernight the Empire of the Vampire series was two books in, with the third yet unpublished. The third book, Empire of the Dawn, came out in November of 2025, at which point I bought all three of them, and … they sat on the shelf. Because I was a hundred miles behind on my reading, and all three of these books are 700+ pages, and despite how amazing Nevernight was, this series had a big disadvantage: It was about vampires.
I am so, so, so tired of vampires.
So anyway, I started Empire of the Vampire on July 6 and finished Empire of the Dawn this morning, July 15, so I read all 2200+ pages of this series in nine days.
It’s fucking amazing. It’s about vampires and it’s amazing. That shit shouldn’t even be possible.
Now, I’m not certain I’m willing to put this above Nevernight just yet. I really need to think about the ending for a while, and I thought about delaying this post for a few days while I worked through my feelings about it. Let me give a general idea why without getting too deep into spoilers: this book is mostly framed as one character telling his life story to someone who is holding him captive. Eventually a second character does some narration as well, and from time to time they break away from the narrative style to a more standard third-person omniscient perspective taking place in the “now” of the book. And it occurred to me partway through book one that we had no real reason to believe that everything he was telling us was true. And that, in fact, an unreliable narrator would fit in perfectly with what was going on in the story. This feeling got a bit stronger when the second character started telling her story and started it by calling the main character a fucking liar.
I don’t like vampires, and I don’t like unreliable narrators, and this book has vampires and unreliable narrators.
Because holy fuck are Gabriel de León and the second narrator massive Gotdamned liars. They are filthy liars. And I’m still not convinced that I like the way all of that worked out in the end.
That said:
This series has the best swearing I’ve ever seen in print. The depth and breadth of the profanity used in Empire of the Vampire should be taught in college classrooms. It’s amazing. I am literally in awe.
As a massive fan of world building, the basic setting of this world– a crumbling civilization where the fucking sun went out, more or less, twenty-six years ago– is absolutely fantastic. They call what happened to the sun the Daysdeath, and this is basically a world where you have night and dusk and it never gets any brighter than that– and that’s what has allowed the sheer number of vampires that exist in these books to exist, and also explains why the several vampire bloodlines have more or less been able to take over the world in the couple of decades since the Daysdeath happened.(*)
Jay Kristoff also writes fantastic battle and large-scale warfare scenes, which he didn’t have a lot of opportunity to use in Nevernight.
The characters and their various relationships are absolutely wonderful. The development you see in Gabriel over the course of the book is awesome, and his relationships with the other characters are constantly evolving, or at least pinioning back and forth between “trying to kill each other” and “not trying to kill each other.” There’s a character in Book One who is going to give you Draco Malfoy vibes; don’t stress, he’ll get better. Much better.
There’s also a sentient, talking sword who is slowly losing her mind over the course of the book. Yes, her. The sword is a girl.
Everyone speaks French for no reason that I can see other than that it usually doesn’t happen in fantasy novels and it adds some neat flavor.
And the use of religion. My God, the use of religion. The religion of the Empire of the Vampire books is a twisted, alternate version of Catholicism, and I am not joking when I tell you that if Jay Kristoff wrote an 800-page sourcebook of the lore and religious practices of this world I would buy it in a second and have it read in a day. Imagine a Catholicism that came from a Jesus who picked up a sword and conquered the world before being betrayed and executed on the wheel. (It’s not literally Jesus; they just call him the Redeemer, but the religion is clearly and intentionally derived from Catholicism.)
Now imagine, in a book that’s already about vampires, the Holy Grail being a major focus of the story.
It’s so so so so so so so fucking good, guys. All of it. And it’s brutal as hell, and it continues Kristoff’s fine tradition of never ever letting anything nice ever happen to his characters; his goal is to hurt them, and in hurting them, hurt you, and he’s amazingly fucking good at it.
Speaking of fucking, this is a vampire novel, so there’s a lot of that as well, and the most unrealistic thing about this series is that it begins with a fifteen-year-old boy who is incredibly enthusiastic about eating pussy. Seriously, the books cover about eighteen years of Gabriel de León’s life, and there is more cunnilingus in this series than all the other books I own put together, and I have everything Sarah J. Maas has ever written.
The second most unbelievable thing about this story is that, remember, de León is telling someone about all of this, so any time he gets laid, he’s supposed to be literally sitting in his little jail cell describing this shit to a vampire who is writing it all down verbatim in a big book. There are moments where he gets mocked for it, but it’s unavoidably a little ridiculous.
Kristoff is absolutely a top-tier talent, and the worst thing is that he hasn’t started releasing whatever he’s working on next– I’m caught up with his books, and one thing he’s definitely shown me is that he’s a huge fan of unexpected reveals and sudden gory deaths (and sudden resurrections– the book’s about vampires, after all) and massive plot twists and I cannot start his next series until it’s finished, because if I had to wait two years in between any of these books I would simply die. But he’s firmly among my favorite writers at this point, and you have to check this series out.
(*) This has had serious effects on wildlife and plant life, as you might expect, and the food chain is all busted to hell as well since agriculture has gotten massively more difficult. You know what you can grow without a whole lot of sunlight? Potatoes. Gabriel de León is so, so, so tired of potatoes, guys, although he remains a fan of vodka.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the stained edges trend, but I’m not sure that I love that I can find this image but not a straight image of the book cover like I’ve been using for years.
You have seen Michelle Jabès Corpora’s (not, fuck you autocorrect, Michelle Babes Corporation) name around here before; I read her His Face is the Sun almost exactly a year ago and loved it, and it ended up twelfth on my end of the year list. An interesting phenomenon: I said in my piece about it in December that I’d have ranked it higher, but a hundred books after first picking it up, I didn’t remember it very well other than that it was set in not-Egypt and I really liked it, and I resolved that I was going to reread it before the sequel, which I already knew was coming in May.
Well, I didn’t reread His Face is the Sun before picking up She Knows All the Names, and I’m pleased and more than a little fascinated to report that once I had the sequel in my hands I had no problems with recalling the events of the first book at all. I almost didn’t review this, to be honest, as what I have to say about it is nearly identical to what I had to say about Sun (go read that review); Corpora’s worldbuilding and characters are fantastic, the plot is twisty-turny and resolves a major plot element from the first book, clearing the way for a different antagonist to take center stage for the final book of the trilogy. I loved the first book, and the second is nearly a perfect sequel, and one of the best middle-book-in-the-trilogy volumes I’ve read in a very long time. I actually, genuinely do want to reread both books before the third volume comes out– not, this time, because I think I’ll need to, but because I think the series will deserve it.
Oh, and the cat’s back. I was a little worried at first; this book uses an animal as a framing device the same way that the first book did, but it’s an ibis and not the cat. No worries! The cat is back, it’s just not a POV character. Maybe the POV animal in the third book will be a crocodile. We can hope, right?
The thought of writing full reviews of all of these makes me tired, and it’s been a long day and my wife is out of town for the next eight days for work so I’m kinda crabby and tired already, and I’ve tried to write these for a week and not gotten anywhere. So we’re going to do this! I’m going to post four book covers! You should read those four books. If you want to know more about them, ask me in comments, and I’ll either respond in comments or write a full review of them this weekend sometime when I’m feeling more like a human being who can be engaged with in society.
At any rate, Canticle woke up my Religious Studies Brain, and after finishing it I immediately texted my friend with a doctorate in theology and insisted that she read it as soon as possible. This is historical fiction and is the only book on the list with no real genre elements, and God, it was so good. So so good.
I could have done without the romance angle in Weavingshaw, but everything else about it is so good that I can overlook it.
This was awesome, and one of the rare books that I wish was longer, especially for those of us who don’t really know anything about Moroccan culture. I wanted more story after The Thing happens, but The Thing doesn’t happen until very late in the book.
Absolutely brilliant, although I’m uncertain why Kay used his fictional Sarantium and didn’t just use Constantinople. I mean, there’s bits of magic and the supernatural here and there, so maybe that in and of itself is why, but I could have accepted a Byzantine Empire with that stuff. I have the sequel to this on my shelf already, though, and this is my first book by Guy Gavriel Kay, but I suspect I’m going to read a lot by him this year.
What I’m learning, looking at this, is that I should have written more book reviews this month. Because Canticle, We Burned So Bright and Sailing to Sarantium could all be Book of the Month and I only reviewed one of them.
Standard disclaimers! Kara Jorgensen and I are mutuals on basically everything, although we have never met, and which precise social media thing we met on has been lost to the mists of time, at least to me. The Reanimator’s Fate is the fourth and final book of the Reanimator Mysteries series and the fifth of their books I have read. Somehow, this will be the first full review I’ve written of one of them— Book Three, The Reanimator’s Remains, got to share a review post with a couple other books, but somehow I appear not to have mentioned the other two books in the series. I’m not sure why— I’ve liked all four of them.
At any rate: The Reanimator Mysteries are the story of Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, Oliver’s partner and investigator. Both work for the New York Paranormal Society; they aren’t cops, precisely, but the Society gets brought in on investigations that obviously involve magic in some way, so they keep pretty busy.
Oh, and Felipe’s dead, technically, although nearly no one other than the two of them knows that, and the two are linked through a magical tether that allows some limited psychic linkage between them (strong emotions can bleed through, and they can “tug” on the tether to communicate if they want) and keeps them from being able to get too far apart. Oliver and Felipe are a great couple and I love reading about how they interact with one another; the way they balance each other out is fascinating. Oliver’s issues are a little bit more front and center, especially since he’s the primary character, but Felipe needs Oliver just as much as Oliver needs Felipe.
The Reanimator’s Fate begins with a naked man trying to steal a magic book, which promptly turns his blood to ink and exsanguinates him, just in case you were thinking this was just a romance book.
There is a lot going on in this book, above and beyond the central mystery, to the point where I really wasn’t sure Kara was going to be able to pull the ending of the book off successfully with about 20 pages left. The Paranormal Society itself gets a lot of development in a way that I don’t really want to get into to avoid spoilers, and while everything does knit itself together satisfyingly at the end, I feel like the book could maybe have used another 25 pages or so to breathe.
The problem is I really want to talk about the ending, and I can’t do it especially effectively without indulging in spoilers, which I don’t want to do. This is the last book of the Reanimator Mysteries series, and while Kara doesn’t kill off the main characters or anything like that there is a major status quo shift at the end of the book that fully justifies calling this the last book.
What I’m really hoping for, though, is that this is the last Reanimator Mysteries book, but it’s not the last Oliver and Felipe book, because there’s no real reason it has to be. Kara’s wheelhouse is the nineteenth century (have I mentioned this is a period book? It’s a period book.) and following the characters would involve taking them out of that context, but I really want to see it. I don’t know if that’s the plan or not, but it should be, damn it. The people demand more Oliver and Felipe! I am the people!
Meanwhile, you should read the series so you can join in the popular uprising for more books.
