James Nicoll Reviews

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond (May 2024)

Kill the dragon. Find the blade. Reclaim her honor. 

It’s that, or end up like countless knights before her, as a puddle of gore and molten armor. 

Maddileh is a knight. There aren’t many women in her line of work, and it often feels like the sneering and contempt from her peers is harder to stomach than the actual dragon slaying. But she’s a knight, and made of sterner stuff. 

A minor infraction forces her to redeem her honor in the most dramatic way possible, she must retrieve the fabled Fireborne Blade from its keeper, legendary dragon the White Lady, or die trying. If history tells us anything, it’s that ​“die trying” is where to wager your coin. 

Maddileh’s tale contains a rich history of dragons, ill-fated knights, scheming squires, and sapphic love, with deceptions and double-crosses that will keep you guessing right up to its dramatic conclusion. Ultimately, The Fireborne Blade is about the roles we refuse to accept, and of the place we make for ourselves in the world. 

Daughter of Calamity by Rosalie M. Lin (June 2024)

Genres collide in this dark and atmospheric reimagining of 1930s Shanghai for fans of Nghi Vo and S. A. Chakraborty. 

Jingwen spends her nights as a showgirl at the Paramount, one of the most lavish clubs in Shanghai, competing ruthlessly to charm wealthy patrons. To cap off her shifts, she runs money for her grandmother, the exclusive surgeon to the most powerful gang in the city. A position her grandmother is pressuring her to inherit…When a series of dancers are targeted — the attacker stealing their faces — Jingwen fears she could be next. And as the faces of the dancers start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, she realizes Shanghai’s glittering mirage of carefree luxury comes at a terrible price. 

Fighting not just for her own safety but that of the other dancers — women who have simultaneously been her bitterest rivals and only friends — Jingwen has no choice but to delve into the city’s underworld. In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than her grandmother ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai’s bones. 

Off-Time Jive by A.Z. Louise (October 2023)

Set during an alternate Harlem Renaissance where new forms of magic created by Black joy strain against the white establishment, Bessie Knox is an investigator of magical mysteries. When her old colleagues at the Bronx Academy of Magic start turning up dead, Knox’s weakened abilities are pushed to their limits, but if she can’t solve the case, she’ll be next. 

Ecoceanic edited by Tarun K. Saint & Francesco Verso (January 2024)

An anthology of short stories and a poem responding to global warming and climate change and their impact on the Global South and Australia 

Fallen by Melissa Scott (December 2023)

Nic en Doroney was promised an education and an academic career in exchange for sharing the nanite burden she carries in her bloodstream. Instead, the Novilis family broke that bargain, and now Nic is captain of a small starship, competing with larger businesses by using illegal Ancestral technology to chart her way through the adjacent possible. But when Rejane Novilis re-enters her life, Nic is unable to resist the chance to work with her again, even if it means challenging the malevolent AI who have already destroyed human society once before. 

Echoes of War by Kristine Smith (December 2023)

Debts linger, waiting to be paid.

When Colonel Niall Pierce is kidnapped, Jani Kilian is ordered to stay out of it. Niall may be her best friend, but he is also an officer in the Commonwealth Service and afull human while she is the half-idomeni head of the hybrid enclave of Thalassa — to attempt his rescue would not only call his loyalty into question and endanger his life but increase tensions between the Commonwealth and the alien idomeni.

Jani is also facing her own problems. Outside forces and inner turmoil are menacing Thalassa, and the behavioral changes wrought by her hybridization leave her shaken and concerned about what she is becoming. But when a threat from her own past compels her to join the search for Niall, she comes to believe that an adversary she thought vanquished has returned. As she and her enigmatic partner Lucien Pascal dodge pursuers and build shaky alliances, she realizes her past and present are one and the same, and dangers she once faced could return to claim her and everything — and everyone — she loves.