SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 21, 2025 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Isle in the Silver Sea is a new stand alone romantic fantasy from award winning British fantasy author Tasha Suri. I've really enjoyed Suri's past work, as she deals with the historical colonizing of countries like India as well as themes of empire and oppression in what are generally all new fantasy worlds. Her work is not subtle, but it has always been incredibly creative with really strong (and often queer) characters who struggle with impossible choices set upon them by oppression and love. I've actually not finished her last trilogy yet despite enjoying the first two books and wouldn't have gone on to her new book...except that I kept seeing on social media advance reviewers I trust that were just utterly raving about it. And so I picked up The Isle in the Silver Sea.

And I'm super glad I did, because the Isle in the Silver Sea is utterly tremendous. The story is a romantic fantasy in a Britain that is sustained literally by the repetition of stories/tales, where incarnations of the characters in such stories are repeatedly reborn to play out the stories again and again so as to sustain the land around them. And the story follows two such incarnations - a Witch who is supposed to enchant innocents from her mountain abode and a Knight who is supposed to fall in love with her and then kill them both for honor - as they seek to find a different path and break the ties that bind them to this depressing fate. Like all Tasha Suri books, the book is remarkably unsubtle (maybe even less so than usual), as it plays with themes of power, of love, of the changing of stories and the different stories different peoples tell, and of what stories and which peoples really make up a nation like Britain. But it works so incredibly well, with the characters being tremendous and the themes being extremely strong and I suspect these themes and characters will play even stronger for readers who are not cis white Americans like myself (especially for British readers). An absolute must read.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Thief Liar Lady by D.L. Soria

 

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 6, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Thief Liar Lady is the first adult book by author D.L. Soria, who has published at least three YA novels under the name Destiny Soria. I've rather liked Soria's YA work, especially the very underrated Beneath the Citadel, which took what seemed like a classic premise (group of teens fight against fascist government which beat their parents) and took it in very wild directions, complete with a shocking to me ending choice by one of othe characters. Thief Liar Lady, despite being adult fic, is similar in that it is also taking a familiar premise - it's a Cinderella adaptation- and trying to take in very different directions. Here, Cinderella is a con artist using magic to attract her prince as part of a scheme by her greedy stepmother and also attempting to use her position to help her actual grandmother, who is a leader in a resistance movement of a people/country subjugated by the royal family. And so the classic dynamics of the Cinderella story change greatly.

The result is a story that is often compelling and got to the point where I found myself 60% through unable to continue for a while, for fear of what would happen to the protagonist and major secondary character I really liked. The conflicts in the setting, and the themes of power, of oppression, of what one should do for a people so oppressed that one only has a tenuous connection to, of heritage and sacrifice, and of how much use of power and control is too much...are well done and interesting, but the book kind of cops out in its last few acts as its protagonist Ash has to respond to events going seriously out of control, and the book's happy ending almost feels like a cop out. Worth a read, if one can handle the trigger warning (see below).

Note: Prior Soria books have featured a mix of straight and queer romances; this book however deals solely with a straight romance and I don't think any queer characters exist, so fans who enjoyed the queer parts of Soria's early works should know they aren't present here.

Trigger Warning: NON-CONSENSUAL Romantic/Sexual relationships. There isn't any traditional rape or sexual abuse on page, but the protagonist begins the book using magical power to entrance the royal prince....and as things get worse, there comes a moment she uses a stronger enchantment resulting in what can only be considered non-consensual sex or rape (with neither party really giving consent). It's very morally dark and while the book never pretends it's okay at all, it may be too much for many readers and the book isn't compelling enough in its themes for me to advise people to push past that anyway.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Our Lady of the Artilects by Andrew Gillsmith

Our Lady of the Artilects is a self-published Sci-Fi novel by author Andrew Gillsmith. It's also a Self-Published Sci-Fi Competition Quarterfinalist - as voted by a different judging panel than the one I'm on - and my judging group decided to take a look at it to see if it was worthy of being a semifinalist, with one member of my group thinking really highly of it. That said, the review she posted of the book noted that the book is very faith based and Catholic faith based in general and she wondered how someone who wasn't Christian might take the book. So I was really curious how this would or would not appeal to me as a Jewish Reader.

And well....the answer is, it doesn't really, due to a number of factors that made it hard to enjoy this book. The book is written generally well, and the author does a good job setting up plot threads and characters and writing in very readable prose, although that prose is based in Catholic thought that I am often unfamiliar with. But the book's future premise seems to be based upon a future version of our world that is filled with Catholics, Muslims, and almost no one else and uses past and current atrocities as setup for its ideas in ways that...was disconcerting in a sense. It made it hard to really recommend his book to anyone who isn't very familiar and into catholic or perhaps some other Christian liturgies, and that's not me and I don't think that's the general SPSFC4 audience either.

Book Review: No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo (Translated by Elizabeth Bryer)

 

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on December 10, 2024 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

No Place to Bury the Dead is a novel translated from its original 2021 award winning release in Spanish (in Spain I believe), where the book was titled El Tercer País (The Third Country). For those who come to my reviews looking for SciFi/Fantasy novels, know that this novel only barely fits: set in 2019, the novel features as a background element a plague that robs people of their memories, but other than that there is nothing speculative here and this novel is more likely to be categorized as "literary". That is not a reason to skip this novel however, as it tells a rough story of pain, grief, resilience, and to a very small extent, hope of moving on in its entirety.

No Place to Bury the Dead follows mostly a woman named Angustias who, along with her infected husband, tries to flee her unnamed Latin American country when it is hit with the memory stealing plague. She carries with her her two twin baby boys, neither of whom survive, and she searches for a place to put them to rest. What she finds is an illegal graveyard run by the rebellious Visitación Salazar, in whose affairs she becomes entangled when she refuses to leave where her children are buried. It's a story about grief and resilience in a world that seems only to promise more and more tragedies and where the people in power are dangerous buffoons...but it also ends on kind of a hopeful note.

Trigger Warning: One character's backstory involves Male on Male rape/sodomy very briefly. Also deaths of children.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T Kingfisher

 

A Sorceress Comes to Call is the latest novel by T Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) to be nominated for some major awards, in this case the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The novel is ostensibly a fairy tale adaptation of "The Goose Girl", but honestly it's an incredibly loose adaptation if that and I completely missed the intent to be such an adaptation until I read other pieces explaining the connection. It's also kind of a regency novel in setting, but not really. Honestly, I felt like the novel was almost more one of Kingfisher's horror novels (another of her common genres) as it dealt with the horrifying implications of a powerful sorceress - who can bind minds, has an extremely scary familiar eek - and the two protagonists' attempts to get free of and to stop her from taking over. Again, I don't think this was meant as a horror novel - it's been a long running joke on social media that Vernon's fluffy romance novels have horrifying moments just because of how her imagination works - but I found it quite chilling and I had to put it down a whole bunch at times to take a break before continuing as a result.

Notably, the horror does work to keep the story intense and strong the story's two main characters - Hester and Cordelia - are excellent in their own very different ways: Cordelia, as the daughter of the sorceress who feels hopelessly alone, unable to break free of her mother and unable to figure out if there is any way of escaping, but who finds some key moments of bravery to take steps forward; and Hester, as the unmarried older sister of the Squire the sorceress wants to seduce and who is desperate to find a way, with the help of some friends and the man she loves, to stop the person she recognizes as "Doom" from getting her way. The story contains some of the trademark T Kingfisher wit in the dialogue, especially when Hester calls for allies, which I think most readers will enjoy, and overall the story ends in a very satisfying fashion. It's not my favorite T Kingfisher book, but it's a very good one and worth your time.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

 

Saint Elspeth is a post apocalyptic sci-fi novel which is one of our finalists for this year's Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (#SPSFC4). The novel is a post apocalyptic story featuring as its main and only viewpoint character Dr. Elspeth Darrow, the only fully trained doctor left in the colony that has developed in what's left of San Francisco. It starts as a story of Elspeth attempting to maintain a reasonable level of medical treatment in the face of dwindling supplies and a colony leader who is getting increasingly fascistic and warlike and soon evolves into a story dealing with strange aliens, as Elspeth and her friends soon try to figure out what's going on with them and what that means for humanity.

It's written well, but oh my god is this book insanely cynical about humanity (I'd say it's mostly cynical about men, but there's only two female characters who get any sort of real page time, and the second one is herself paranoid and utterly cynical). The book postulates that the arrival of aliens doing nothing but just hanging around would be enough to cause nations to go mad and destroy the planet, and then later postulates that all men who would grow to lead the post apocalyptic settlements would turn into fascist wannabe cult leaders who are desperate to wage war on each other. In the face of all this is Elspeth, the rare character who despite her own depression and despair somehow manages to keep focusing upon healing and figuring things out so as to save the day, both from threats that are human and those that are inhuman and alien. I get that there's a theme about hope and healing and whatnot here, but god I couldn't help but keep being removed from this narrative not just by occasional issues with the tech levels of the setting, but really just from the dismal unbelievable cynicism about human nature all around (and yes I can say that even living in 2025).

Trigger Warning: A Suicide Attempt forms a major part of the story. This is not gratuitous and the book shows what is necessary for its themes and emotional beats to hit, so I think it's done as well as you could hope, but if this is a problem please be warned.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Yours Celestially by Al Hess

 

Yours Celestially is one of the six finalists in this year's Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC4), of which I am a Judge. The story takes place in an interesting future world, in which a company (Renascenz) has invented technology that allows those who use it to die, have their minds uploaded to an online server called "Limbo" and then seemingly be resurrected into a new body of their choosing. But during the delay period while someone is in Limbo, they interact with an AI called "Metatron" who tries to counsel them through their traumas before they resurrect. Using this setup, the story focuses upon two characters: Metatron, as they fall in love with one of the souls who are in Limbo and struggle with this new feeling, and Sasha, a resurrected person who is finding his new life even harder because he is seemingly getting hit with all of Metatron's pining and feelings for Rodrigo.

It's a setup that seems potentially really interesting and I wanted to like Yours Celestially a lot more than I did. But honestly, I struggled to keep going through this one and might've DNFed it if it wasn't a finalist for the SPSFC4 Crown. Specifically, I had problems really caring about Sasha, one of our two main protagonists, as his setting and the characters' he interacts with are only explained to a limited extent, to the point where I didn't really get why he cared about certain people or why those people cared about him (specifically his roommate Ivan). The romance with Sasha at its heart also really had a rough start, and while it gets better, it really isn't great. The Metatron chapters are better because it's a lot easier to care for them, but even there there's one character who's abusive in the middle of it which makes some of those chapters hard to read, and really felt like a betrayal of a book whose author seems to call it "hopepunk" in the foreward. Overall, I just have a hard time recommending this one, for reasons I'll expound further in the book.

TRIGGER WARNING: There is an abusive character in the book who reacts with rage and violence while in a virtual world and acted with real violence outside of it. Reading parts with that character can be rough, although the book kind of handles it well, even if I didn't like it. Also, one of the two main characters is recovering from a drug addiction.