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Book Review: Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham

Cover of Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham: Book One of the Kithamar trilogy. Features a woman's face superimposed onto a city map.

This is not a non-fiction book, there definitely is a protagonist and her name is Alys.  But in a real way, this novel (and I am going to venture, the entire series) really has the city of Kithamar as its real protagonist and telling Alys’ story is a way to tell part of the story of Kithamar.

Book Review: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

Cover of P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, featuring a dark-skinned woman wearing dreadlocks, a gold cat mask and black leather gloves, holding a pair of swords crossed across her chest.

In all, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a lean and mean novella that goes down like liquid fire and leaps through the reader’s mind like dancing across rooftops in Tal Abisi.

Book Review: The Jaguar Mask, by Michael J. DeLuca

Cover of The Jaguar Mask by Michael J. DeLuca, featuring a jaguar with glowing yellow eyes, a green and blue bird, and a pictographic border that includes cars.

I started out only able to read this book in small bites, taking time for digestion, but by the end, I was eating it up eagerly, hungry for the meanings that were emerging and the inspirations I could take from it.

Review: The Warden by Daniel M. Ford

Cover of The Warden, by Daniel M. Ford, featuring a female figure apparently casting some kind of spell on a cloaked figure, amid a wilderness that's partly dark and partly pink.

… So, once things do kick off, we get a lot of fun action sequences, a main character learning to do better and learning to adapt her city and courtly ways to the wild frontier, to tackle a problem far bigger and dangerous than she imagined, and torn between wanting to stick it out and wanting to decamp for other climes. …

Book Review: The Thief and the Wild, by Seann Barbour

Cover of The Thief and the Wild by Seann Barbour, featuring a three-eyed cat on a tree limb in the foreground, in front of a steamboat on the water, with a city on the background.

This Southern-flavored steampunk fantasy is as easy to sink into as a hammock, with a nice breezy tone most of the time, narrated by a sympathetic protagonist with a wry point of view, relating an exciting plot that moves around a bayou town, up and down, and eventually strikes out into the wilderness, with a cataclysmic confrontation at the climax.