Our favorite books so far this year are so wonderfully human. A sexbot’s quest for self-determination, a haunted house inhabited by angry witches, more than one heartbreaking new take on time travel — genre fiction is always about how we live now, but this year how we live now seems so much closer to the surface. With romantasy, Gothic horror, and retellings of classic myths, many of our picks this year bleed with wit and pain and good old-fashioned lusty passion, as the dread of the last few years gives way to a feeling of restlessness, a raw chrysalis awaiting what’s next.
No one really knows, but we’re having a hell of a time reading these dazzling attempts to sort it all out. Our latest update added T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call .
This standalone fantasy starts in an unbeatably intriguing moment, with the protagonist, 14-year-old Cordelia, paralyzed in church, unable to even shoo away the fly tormenting her. It rapidly emerges that her mother is a sorceress whose idea of parental discipline involves possessing Cordelia’s body for days on end. Evangeline is a ruthless woman with a bottomless appetite for wealth, status, and fancy things, but she’s also lazy enough that she and Cordelia live in a backwater hovel — until Evangeline decides it’s time to upgrade, by netting rich men for both her and her unwilling but thoroughly cowed daughter.
Kingfisher — the pen name of Ursula Vernon, who writes and illustrates middle-grade books under her own.