Tag: urban fantasy

[Book Review] Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ #1) by Rachel Aaron

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Fantasy writer Rachel Aaron has had one hell of a year in publishing. She’s teamed up with her husband Travis to write Forever Fantasy Online (the first in a trilogy of fantasy novels), published Garrison Girl, an original novel set in the Attack on Titan universe, and opened up the year by releasing the fifth and final book in her amazing Heartstrikers series, Last Dragon Standing.

Her newest release, Minimum Wage Magic, returns to the Heartstrikers series main setting, the Detroit Free Zone (DFZ for short) with a new cast of main characters and a DFZ that is the most stable it’s been in a while. Set twenty years after the original series, this novel revolves around Opal Yong-ae, a freelance mage that works as Cleaner in the city, who fumbles her way into a mystery when she finds the dead body of a mage in one of the apartment she’s supposed to be cleaning.Read More »

Urban Fantasy 101: Definitive-Ish

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Wikipedia’s definition for “urban fantasy” is pretty unhelpful in its broadness.

Basically, it calls urban fantasy “a subgenre of fantasy in which the narrative has an urban setting” and goes on to mention that urban fantasy works are “set primarily in the real world and contain aspects of fantasy”.

It’s definitely a definition, but it’s not exactly an clear one.Read More »

[Review] The Neon Boneyard (Daniel Faust #8) by Craig Schaefer

Stitch

The Neon Boneyard Cover

We’re eight (and a half, there’s a novella) books into Craig Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series and I’m still as huge a fan as I was when I cracked open the first book a couple years ago.

Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series is urban fantasy that blends the supernatural with elements that wouldn’t be out of place in heist/gangster movies. Daniel Faust is a con-man, a practitioner, and a pain in the ass to a whole bunch of powerful people in the supernatural and mundane parts of Las Vegas.Read More »

[Review] Taste of Wrath (Sin du Jour #7) by Matt Wallace

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Note: I am going to spoil the HELL out of this novella so if you haven’t read any of the books yet… Go buy them all, pour yourself an increasingly intense series of alcoholic drinks (if that’s your thing), and alternate between Matt’s books and my tipsy reviews.

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Choose your buy link here.

Audio companion: 

When we last saw the Sin Du Jour crew in 2017’s Gluttony Bay, shit had officially hit the fan.

I’m talking “we’ve lost people and the bad guys are shaping up to kick everyone’s butts” levels of badness. Of course, I’ve loved Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour series from the moment that I stress bought the first book right around my twenty-fifth birthday almost three years ago. Envy of Angels changed my life and honestly? So did Taste of Wrath.Read More »

Stitch Reads Stuff: October TBR List

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Stitch Reads Stuff - My October TBR List

This October, I’m focusing on young adult books and supernatural fiction!

I’m doing some necessary re-reads for reviewing purposes, diving into some books I haven’t had the time to read, and reading one of my most anticipated reads for Fall 2018. I’m looking forward to getting into these books and talking to y’all about them!

So, what’s on my reading list for October 2018?

First up are the physical books! I tend to read on my kindle more than anything else – partly because I have a bunch of kindles from years of buying them and so I’ve always got one charged – but some books you just have to have in your hand. You know?Read More »

[Review] Brooklyn Ray’s Undertow (Port Lewis Witches #2)

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Note: This review contains spoilers for the first book in Brooklyn Ray’s Port Lewis Witches series.

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Things get extra tense in Undertow, the second novella in Brooklyn Ray’s Port Lewis witches series.

Now, I seriously enjoyed my introduction to Ray’s writing in Darkling and thought it was a fantastic read, but Undertow is even better.

For one thing, Undertow introduces us to some more of the mysteries present in Port Lewis’s witch community – including a conflict between demons that shapes their lives.

Undertow is set shortly after Darkling, the novella that introduced us to necromancer Ryder Lewellyn and his friend-turned-boyfriend, Liam Montgomery, a witch whose magical affinity tends towards water. Liam is the focus of this novella and I think he’s an incredibly solid protagonist, fleshed out even more than he was in the previous novella.Read More »

[Review] Deadline (Harrietta Lee #1) – Stephanie Ahn

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Deadline Cover

Stephanie Ahn’s debut novel is, frankly, one of the finest urban fantasy books that I’ve read this year.

Deadline is such a super rereadable book thanks to Harrietta Lee, our main character who happens to be flawed and fun, and Ahn’s incredible worldbuilding. From the first line in the book, one that sees Harry noticing a demon that’s busy checking her out, I was hooked. Harry is a witch who doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in New York’s magical community and, as a result, has been forced to take assorted odd jobs as a magical private investigator because she doesn’t have the connections she once had.Read More »

[Review] Soulless (Awakening of the Spirit #3) by Montiese McKenzie

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Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I received an advanced copy of this book from the author. All of the opinions in this review are my own and entirely honest. There are no significant spoilers beyond what’s in the “Content Notes/Warning” section directly below the review.

Soulless Cover

Soulless, the third novel in Montiese McKenzie’s Awakening of the Spirit series, is an urban fantasy crime drama with expansive cast of interconnected characters, a thrilling main plot, and a frightening villain called the Darkness looming over the protagonists’ lives and manipulating the world around them.

Honestly, it kind of has a little bit of everything thanks to the book’s focus on found families, immediately aww-worthy relationships, intense action scenes, and McKenzie’s vivid writing style.Read More »

Urban Fantasy 101: A Few of My Favorite Fang-Havers

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I know I’m about to get my critical little claws all over vampires in the urban fantasy genre once more with my upcoming piece on vampire supremacy in the genre, but before I do, I want to shout out some of my favorite vampires in fiction. While shapeshifters are my main weakness when it comes to supernatural beings, vampires have always been… neat.

So, here are five of my favorite vampires in no particular order.

Marcel Gerard (The Originals)

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Backstory: First introduced on The Vampire Diaries in a backdoor pilot for The Originals, Marcel starts off the series as the ruling vampire in New Orleans. Born to the governor of Louisiana, a slaveowner, and one of the women he enslaved before being turned by Klaus Mikaelson (a werewolf, vampire hybrid with less morals than common sense), Marcel has spent much of his life and unlife trying to get respect and recognition. He’s got power now, but he’s constantly undermined at every turn and the respect he’s spent decades trying to get… is pretty fleeting.

Why I Love Them: In many ways, Marcel is a fantastic successor to many of our older literary vampires that literally shaped how so many of us view vampires. He is romantic, but tragic. Cruel, but with a deep kindness in him. He has so much going on because he’s a Black vampire in a world of largely white ones. Where he’s on the top of the heap in so many ways, but then there’s the Mikkaelsons to remind him that he’s “just” a former slave and not on their level in anyway. He’s one of the few characters in The Vampire Diaries franchise that I want to see survive and thrive. He’s a bit of a douchebag but… he’s my douchebag.

Alas, The Originals needs a writer’s room more diverse than a bag of marshmallows because I still don’t think he’s ever received the storylines that he deserves when compared to the other vampires in the franchise.Read More »

[Review] Brooklyn Ray’s Darkling (Port Lewis Witches #1)

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Note: I won an ebook copy of this novella from the author themselves in a giveaway last week. That has no influence on my enjoyment of the book and all opinions herein are my own.

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Darkling CoverDarkling, the first novella in Brooklyn Ray’s Port Lewis Witches series is a dark and delicious deep dive into a magical world unlike many I’ve seen before.

In Port Lewis, a small town in the state of Washington, magic practitioners of all types are kind of commonplace in everyday life, with different families bringing their specialties to the table.

Darkling primarily focuses on Ryder Lewellyn, a late-blooming trans dude who happens to be a necromancer with an affinity for fire, and his close friend (and future lover) Liam Montgomery, a witch with an affinity for water.Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake Reread: Bloody Bones

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For this installment of my reread series, I’ll be changing up the format in order to look at “The Good”, “The Bad”, and “The Just Plain Borked” parts of the novel. If this all goes well, this will be what these reread recaps look like for the rest of the series!

Content Warnings: brief descriptions of sexual assault and harassment, descriptions of violence, non-specific mention of child sexual assault and turning (both done by a vampire pedophile) in the plot, as well as a reference to the snuff film described in the previous book

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This is one of the UK covers for Bloody Bones That Hamilton has up on her website.

Bloody Bones, the fifth book in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is another busy book in the series where a ton of stuff happens but also… nothing happens. It’s not one of the worst books in the series thus far, but it’s not a novel I enjoyed rereading.

As one of the earlier books in the series, the novel focuses more on the supernatural detective aspects that were significant in the first ten or eleven books in the series. It also introduces interesting new aspects to the worldbuilding by being the first (and so far, only) novel in the series to have fairies onscreen – a disservice I think because they’re some of the most interesting non-human characters that she’s created and their portrayal in Bloody Bones is nothing like the way they’re treated in her Merry Gentry series.

That being said, let’s talk about what Bloody Bones did well, what it did that could’ve used work, and all the things that made me want to chuck my kindle halfway across the room while I was rereading.Read More »

[Small Stitch Reviews] May 21st

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Whatever for Hire by R. J. Blain

A paranormal romance novel with jokes everywhere and a minor enemies-to-lovers relationship between the main characters, what makes Whatever For Hire fall flat for me is the copious use of the g-slur. Yes, that g-slur. The main character Kanika is half-Egyptian and half-Rromani (but also, maybe not even that considering the hints that the literal devil kept dropping), but did this book have to be rife with the g-slur being dropped willy nilly all over the place on top of Orientalism out the butt? (Aside from Kanika, all of the Egyptian characters were evil, teenager-selling, forced-marriage-having assholes so… problem much?)

Whatever For Hire could’ve been decent but instead, it was kind of a mess where the little moments that I disliked wound up adding up fast.

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Ship It by Britta Lundin

Ship It, as you can tell from the title, is about shipping and fandom. It’s about Claire, a teenager who watches a Supernatural-esque primetime drama and ships the main characters. When she actually gets a chance to talk to one of the two leads on the show at a convention, things go pear-shaped when she brings up shipping and representation and he kind of… doesn’t react well.

I know a lot of people that liked Ship It in my group of fandom nerds who also read young adult fiction. I wanted to like it too. I even requested it on NetGalley because I thought it’d be amazing.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into Lundin’s debut novel even though I tried my hardest. I’ve been stalled at 40% for a few weeks now and while I might eventually return to it, right now I’m not that into the portrayal of fandom or fans. While Lundin’s writing is fun and full of snappy banter between the characters, I found it incredibly difficult to care about most of them or what they were going through.

I also, honestly think that with everything I’ve been going through in fandom, this kind of book would’ve been a good read for 2013!Stitch or younger – you know, before I got in the thick of things with the discourse.

The Great Big Anita Blake ReRead – The Lunatic Cafe

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Content/Trigger Warning: References to sexual violence, sex work/er shaming, and well… a snuff film in the text that I describe in medium detail. I still can’t believe it was in the book. I cover the ableist language in the title in the bonus section alongside a bunch of other stuff that I found frustrating about the novel, but that wasn’t related to my angle.

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Lycanthropes are nothing if not practical.

— Anita, woefully understating the circumstances behind a snuff film released into the US Underworld. Lycanthropes aren’t practical. If anything, in the Anitaverse, they’re largely actual monsters.

While the previous Anita Blake novel introduced lycanthropes on the large scale, The Lunatic Cafe is the novel that really introduced some of the messed up facts of life as a shapeshifter in Anita’s world.

The one main question that The Lunatic Cafe appears to ask throughout the narrative is whether or not shapeshifters are truly human (like “we” are). It’s a question asked in almost all of the shapeshifter focused books in the series and one that tends to glean different answers depending on the novel and the characters essentially posing the question.

In this book, the answer is… kinda, sorta, not really.

Read More »