OKAY BUCKLE UP GUYS, do I have some book recs for you.
Fun, enjoyable, not grimdark SFF is still out there, being written and printed, but it can be hard to know where to look, and reader exhaustion is real, particularly when you’ve taken a risk and been disappointed enough times.
This is a mix of SFF fiction, and a mix of age groups (mostly YA and adult, but there is one that I think is technically middle grade but it is FUCKING DELIGHTFUL so you should read it anyway.)
In fact, let’s start with that middle grade one because it’s the first in a series, I’ve only read the first one but it took me two years to get around to reading it and I spent a lot of the time going “why has this taken me so long???”
Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend (the Nevermoor series)
This book is like Harry Potter, if Harry Potter had a girl as the main character, set in a steampunk world, with the whimsy turned up 300%. Morrigan is a delightfully pragmatic lead character, who has spent all her life told she is cursed and will die on her 11th birthday. She’s blamed for any mishaps that happen in her presence, from the small inconveniences to people dropping dead. Her parents have basically been mourning her since she was born. BUT on the night she is due to die, she’s saved from the baying hounds of death (literal) by a quirky man who whisks her to a place that isn’t on the maps, and promises to train her if she can become a member of the Wundrous Society. They only accept a handful of people, however, and your magical talents have to be spectacular.
But Morrigan doesn’t think she has one. And Jupiter North, her rescuer, won’t tell her what hers is. Instead, she has to make it through all the trials based on her own ingenuity and the friendships she has made.
While this book is technically pitched to MG readers, it’s a good length, well-paced and structured, and it doesn’t speak down to the reader. I have no kids, and I don’t habitually read younger than YA, but I adored every second of this. If you want a more in-depth review, there’s one over on my blog.
Caraval - Stephanie Garber (the Caraval series)
If you want a glossy series of fairy tale-esque stories, these are gorgeous, beautifully-imagined stories of magic and mystery following two sisters, Tella and Scarlett. Caraval is a magical game that runs across several days, powered by magic and run by the enigmatic Legend. When Scarlett finds that Tella has run away to Caraval to escape their controlling father, putting Scarlett’s upcoming marriage at risk. Scarlett thinks her plan to get them out is safer, but she needs to find Tella and bring her home first.
Except Tella is in Legend’s power, and has become the prize for Caraval. So now Scarlett has to play the game against hundreds of other people to save her sister and both of their futures.
The world expands as the books continue - book two gives us Tella’s perspective and moves Caraval from Legend’s island to the capital city for the Empress’ birthday celebrations; book three shows them fighting against powers they couldn’t even imagine to save themselves, and Legend.
I reviewed all three of these on my blog. They’re stylish, filled with a gorgeous aesthetic, and while there are mentions of parental abuse, death, and some darker elements, in general they’re dealt with using a very light hand and don’t bury themselves in grimdark.
The Rook - Daniel O’Malley (The Checquy Files)
This book and its sequel, Stiletto, are a fantastic pair of modern fantasy books, full of humour but also with brilliant characters, unique powers, and a great plot. I will shout about these books until I’m hoarse, and then some more until he writes another one. The first book was made into a TV series by Starz, but I haven’t seen it yet so I can’t speak for how good an adaptation it is.
The first book introduces us to Myfanwy Thomas, who has woken up in the middle of a rainy park in London, surrounded by dead bodies, with no idea who she is or how she got there. The only clue she has is a letter in her coat pocket, claiming to be from herself, telling her where to go to find more information.
Part Myfanwy guides present Myfanwy through what she’s facing. She’s a senior figure in the Magical MI5, but someone wanted her out of the way. Why? She’s not sure, she’s only been known for her administrative skills rather than her powers, which is why when she found out she would lose her memories she prepared, at length, to help herself. Meanwhile, lacking past Myfanwy’s neuroses, present Myfanwy finds herself pushing powers beyond what anyone ever imagined.
Book two brings us two new narrative characters, again both women, from different sides of negotiations that Myfanwy set up. All the women in these books are brilliantly realised, and at no point are they sexualised. There is some violence, and given the nature of the powers, some stuff which could be deemed as slightly body-horror esque? But it’s never treated that way - I struggle with the grotesque and overly gruesome, and I felt like this felt on the right side of the tone barrier for me.
I haven’t reviewed these yet, but I haven’t had a chance to re-read them since starting my blog. I can’t recommend them more highly.
Aurora Rising - Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (the Aurora Cycle)
This is an SF space opera, YA, full of campy tropes and the BEST of everything in terms of rag-tag teams and glossy action. The second book, Aurora Burning was just released this year. I’ve reviewed both over on the blog!
Set in the far future, in far space, after humans have made a peace pact with other alien races and created the Aurora Legion. Tyler Jones is set to graduate and get the best squad in the legion after coming top of his class. Unfortunately, the night before he graduates he takes a flight into fold-space and finds the ruins of a 200-year-old human transport vessel, and - impossibly - someone still alive inside, in cryostasis. He rescues her, but is forced to stay in quarantine and is left with the dregs of the recruitment pool - except for his twin sister and their childhood friend, a diplomat and a pilot respectively.
The rag-tag crew are sent on what appears to be a keep-busy mission for their first assignment, but soon discover that the girl 200 years out of time is far more important than they ever dreamed, and they’re the only ones who can protect her. They’re just not sure who they’re protecting her from.
I’ve not read any of Kristoff or Kaufman’s other stuff, and I know that Kristoff’s solo work tends to lead towards to grimdark. But while this does have some darker elements, they’re all plot-based, not universe or tonal. It doesn’t feel like a dark book, it feels like a high-energy book, with fun tricks and things. A variety of neat alien races, and roles within the Aurora Legion that read like personality quiz outcomes. In fact, they even made a quiz for you to find out!
It’s ongoing, so I can’t promise how it turns out, but I’m really loving it so far.
Flame in the Mist - Renee Ahdieh
This, and its sequel Smoke in the Sun, are Japanese-inspired light-fantasy books. It’s a duology, but I’d recommend reading them both together as the second book gets more of a punch when followed directly on rather than with a gap between. I reviewed them both on my blog.
Imagine this - a rich, genius girl due to be forced into an arranged marriage, she comes under attack by raiders and disguises herself as a boy to join an infamous band of outlaws. Imagine a Mulan-style “am I gay?” crisis for one of the leaders of the band, who can’t understand why he is really kind of into the short new recruit. Meanwhile, Mariko’s brother, a famous samurai, is trying to track down her apparent killers, and two princes - one legitimate, one the son of a concubine, try to turn the situation to their own benefit.
There are themes of honour and betrayal, court politics and long games played. Who can you trust? When does loyalty to your leader turn into betraying your people? When does doing the right thing become the wrong thing?
Book two is darker than book one, with the corrupting influence of unchecked power being explored and you get some torture and abuse. That said, it’s handled delicately and doesn’t feel too much like she’s trying to make a meal of it. They’re comparatively short, easy reads, which play with a range of tropes.
The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear - Walter Moers (the Zamonia series)
Walter Moers is a German author, who has written a wide range of whimsical, surreal fantasy books, with gentle humour and fun illustrations. Most, if not all, are set in the wonderful world of Zamonia. Captain Bluebear is the longest I think, but he’s also written Rumo, The City of Dreaming Books and The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books.
I’ll admit I’ve only finished Captain Bluebear, and it took me a very long time to do so because it is LONG, and I was a lot younger so it felt like a really big chunk of time. It doesn’t have what I’d call a driving plot, none of his books do, but they explore completely out-there ideas, there’s very little tethering to the real world at all in them, so if you want escapism you might find these the perfect read. They’re entirely divorced from reality, and totally unpredictable. They’re very long, very gentle, and really rather wholesome.
Darkwood - Gabby Hutchinson Crouch (The Darkwood series)
The second book in this series is due to come out on 25th June, and I’ve reviewed both over on the blog again. These are literal fairy tales, using characters from Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood and the Seven Ravens (and that’s just in the first two books). They’re campy, chaotic and, not to overuse the word, fairly whimsical. However, the author is also a comedy writer for UK current affairs satire shows, so there is a healthy dose of satire in them.
For me, I felt it was pretty near the knuckle in book 2 in particular, which focuses a lot on elections and… political misrepresentations. That felt a little like poking a bruise for me after the last few years, and I think that the author was a little angrier in book two than book one, but also she’s spreading the world further and building it up ready to rope in more fairy tale characters and make the most of them.
The first book in particular was mostly set in and around this tiny village, called Nearby, and was filled with all the sort of local bickering and sniping that entirely delighted me.
Battlestar Suburbia - Chris McCrudden (The Battlestar Suburbia series)
From the same publisher as the Darkwood series, you’ve got this delightfully zany Sci-Fi caper, set in a future where smart appliances have realised that they’re smarter than humans and have taken control. It starts with our everyman, Darren, desperately trying to avoid having to become a cleaner after losing his own business, inadvertantly murdering a robot while attempting to give it a hand job (cleaning out its circuitry), and accidentally joining the human resistance. Meanwhile, sentient breadmaker, Pamasonic Teffal, has accidentally uncovered corruption in her job and goes on the lam disguised as a motorcycle after her boss tries to have her assassinated. She takes on the pseudonym Pam Van Dam and finds herself falling in alongside Darren and Kelly as they try to fight for human freedom.
Add into this jokes which are seeded pages in advance but delivered so casually that you have to go back to see exactly how subtle the build-up is, and four old ladies who accidentally became cyborgs when their hair dryer hoods fused to them during the robot uprising hundreds of years ago, and some very camp humour, you’ve got something really rather cheering on your hands.
I’ve got more in-depth reviews of both titles on my blog, and Chris McCrudden also wrote a Christmas-themed short story that was published in four episodes on the Farrago website.
The Belles - Dhonielle Clayton (The Belles duology)
These two books are glossy, stylish YA novels set in a steampunk fantasy world blending elements from ante-bellum New Orleans and Japanese cultures into something that reads visually stunning. In a world where all people are cursed to be grey and hideous, except for a generation of Belles - these women are beautiful, and possess the power to change peoples’ appearances to make them beautiful for a short while.
Camellia dreams of being the Belle assigned to the royal family, but she is deemed too headstrong, not able to follow instructions. But when her sister is dismissed suddenly she finds herself promoted and directly in the line of fire for the demanding princess.
These books have a not-so-subtle message - beauty is what you make it, trying to change yourself to follow fashion is painful, the value cocmes from diversity in appearance - but the story itself develops into something of a light conspiracy thriller. There are some elements that could tend a little to body horror - the beauty treatments essentially are a sort of magical cosmetic surgery and don’t come without pain or risk - but again, Clayton deals with it carefully and respectfully.
I’ve reviewed both of these on the blog, but as with the Flame in the Mist duology I’d recommend reading both of these together for the second book to have the sort of punch it needs.
Just One Damned Thing After Another - Jodi Taylor (The Chronicles of St Mary’s)
Hello would you like some zany pseudo-sci-fi chaos with time travel, maladjusted geniuses, and dry British humour? I stumbled across this series by accident when the first book was made available for review on Netgalley to promote something like the ninth one, and I fell deeply in love with it, as my review will attest.
Capable, intelligent, strong female lead? Check. Understated romance with someone lovely? Check. Absolute chaos because everyone involved in the project is essentially a mad genius, but people treating it as completely normal because it happens all the time and they’re used to it? Check.
Time travelling historians, guys. Time travellers who are experts in different eras of history, who travel back in time to find answers to research questions, no interaction, no interference, and they simply pretend they are just the green berets of book research when people commission them to find something out.
It’s a fantastic system of time travel set up, and as it’s exploited for evil the plot thickens and they have to take different approaches to try and save the day. I loved EVERY SECOND of this wonderful book, and if you want something that makes you feel like hopping into the TARDIS, you probably won’t get much closer than this.
Space Opera - Catherynne M. Valente
You might recognise this author as the woman who wrote The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairy Land In A Ship Of Her Own Making, but for this short, high-glitter novels, she asks the question “What about is Space had Eurovision?”
It’s 3000% camp, has lines that Douglas Adams would be proud of, and is an absolute celebration of cultural, gender and sexual diversity, liberally topped with glitter, and friendship, and love, while also being set in the middle of the biggest musical bitch fight the world knows on a galaxy-wide level.
This book is gleeful, giddy, empowering and exciting. I read the whole thing with a Big Damn Smile on my face, and at the end of it I felt like I’d had a musical hug. When I reviewed it on my blog, I waxed lyrical about it. I found Fairy Land a little dense for my personal tastes, but this was the exact sort of balls to the wall nonsense that I adored. I love Eurovision and its politics, I love that it was taken just as far as it could possibly go to become a galactic battle for survival, I love that the representative that the aliens choose for Earth is a mixed-race, genderqueer, pansexual ex glam-rocker, and I love how all the Earth authorities absolutely flip out about it while the aliens are like “this person best demonstrates your species’ potential for advanced thought and evolution.”
Honestly I’d have been happy just with a book that was straight out space Eurovision without any of the additional plots, but it gave me something so much more and it’s a motherfricking delight.
Crown of Feathers - Nicki Pau Preto (The Crown of Feathers series)
Some light-fantasy coming-of-age, but with MOTHERFRACKING PHOENIXES. The fantasy is pretty low-key, as of book one it seems to be entirely restricted to an ability to communicate with animals in humans, and the aforementioned presence of Motherfracking Phoenixes.
Set after phoenix riders and phoenixes have been wiped out, and magic made illegal, it follows two sisters who are descended from riders, desperate to find and bond with their own birds and become riders. Their relationship is fraught, the older sister is controlling, and after the older kills her sister’s phoenix out of jealousy, the younger runs away, disguises herself as a boy, and finds an underground resistance which is breeding and raising phoenixes. (the word phoenix now looks really weird to me).
It also follows a man with powers who is undercover in the army, hiding his skills and trying to keep his head down and not get killed.the two parallel storylines work around each other and intersect as the oppressive state and the burgeoning rebellion circle around each other. I loved book one, and go into more detail on the blog, but haven’t had a chance to read book two yet.
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind - Jackson Ford (The Frost Files)
Do you like zany hijinks with a hot mess of a main character? Do you like rag-tag teams who just about manage to work with each other but who are forced beyond their endurance by conspiracies and threats? Do you like a book that really just tells you what it’s about in the title?
This is a book that starts at a sprint and then just keeps going. Teagan Frost is 100% certain that she is the only person in the world who has special powers. She knows that because her parents made her, her brother, and her sister, and her brother and sister are dead and all her parents’ research was destroyed. So when a string of murders starts happening that could only have been committed by someone with her powers, she looks like the only possible suspect.
Except, she didn’t do it.
On the clock to try and work out who is killing these people, trying to work out the connection between the victims and keep them alive, while all she really needs is a goddamn nap and a burrito, Teagan and her crew are pushed beyond their limits personally and with each other. There’s more info in the review on my blog, and an upcoming sequel to build on where this book leaves off.
What’s the title of the sequel? Random Sh*t Flying Through The Air.
Soulless - Gail Carriger (The Parasol Protectorate series)
Yes yes, vampires and werewolves have been done to death, but hear me out. Steampunk, queer rep, and a main character whose entire power is based on the fact that she cancels out any supernatural being around her.
We first meet Alexia Tarabotti when she’s trying to eat a treacle tart that she’s secretly ordered after the food at a party isn’t good enough (which is a power move that I admire) and a vampire tries to bite her but as a result of her power nullification ends up just gently gnawing on her neck and looking a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.
It’s the first of a series of five books that has lesbian inventors in Victorian suits, gay flamboyant vampires, quietly gay nerdy werewolves, and one very grouchy and scruffy Scottish (le gasp!) werewolf, whose worst crime seems to be that he is, in fact, Scottish.
A sequel series has started following the next generation of the Tarabotti clan, although I’ve not read that yet, and Carriger has also written another delightful series set in a finishing school for lady assassins. All her stories are wonderfully camp, with a fantastic aesthetic and dry-but-ridiculous humour, and a decent amount of time spent thinking about cakes.
I’m going to pause there because it’s taken me ages to to this, BUT you can find so many more reviews on the blog, with a new one going up every week!
Come find us at NerdsLikeMe.co.uk
There is SO MUCH SFF out there, for a huge range of tastes. I know grimdark has become vogue in recent years, but I’ll be honest it’s not my favourite subgenre (although I have read some absolute bangers in grimdark too, so I’ll never write off a book without trying it). I love escapist SFF, so if you are ever after anything fun, light, or something to scratch a specific itch, come ask me about it! I’ll always be very happy to help.
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