When I went back and reviewed I noticed that I hadn’t read as much fantasy this year as I usually do. I had replaced it with a lot more sci-fi. And what I had read was – fine. It entertained me in the moment but it didn’t stick with me. I couldn’t tell you what a few of the books were about. Here are the books that I really liked.
Three women whose lives are falling apart find themselves drawn to a new occult shop in their town.
There was great dialogue and insight into betrayal and putting your life back together.
“What are spells but prayers men don’t like?”
This one will only work for long term Dresden fans but for that group it is wonderful. It covers a year of rebuilding after a traumatic fight in the last book that killed a major character. Dresden is deep in grief and deciding if he wants to pull himself out while still feeling his responsibility to Chicago’s wellbeing.
This is another book where you need to have invested a long time in the series to understand it but it is worth it.
There are so many characters in this series but I loved the few books from Mary’s point of view.
This is the start of a series so you don’t have to be deep in lore to read it! A traumatized female werewolf runs a combination bookstore and bar for magical patrons in San Francisco. Her protections start to break down and she needs to deal with the wolves who hurt her but now she has help from her new friends.
Major trigger warnings for past abuse
This one makes me laugh.
It is accessible to people who haven’t read this series. It is a series of short stories about a werewolf being sent on blind dates and nothing goes right on any of them.
But for fans of the larger series that it comes from, the author just casually drops in the answer to a mystery that’s been in the background of several books. I guess it was just to see if we’d been paying attention and to make sure we didn’t skip this book because it didn’t seem to fit the overall story. I gasped and then laughed at the power move.
