James Nicoll Reviews

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2021 The Return of the Sorceress is a standalone secondary-universe fantasy novella.

Yalxi, Supreme Mistress of the Guild of Sorcerers, has been deposed. But her usurper Xellah has made a fatal error: he has kept her alive as a prisoner so that he can make use of her magic-imbued blood. Dead foes may not be useful as sources of magic but living foes can escape, which is what Yalxi has done. 

Wounded and stripped of the Diamond Heart from which so much of her power came, Yalxi is nevertheless an opponent of whom Xellah should be wary. 

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2021’s She Who Became the Sun is the first volume in Shelley Parker-Chan’s Radiant Emperor historical fantasy series.

A seer assures Zhu Chongba that he has a grand destiny, the exact nature of which is vague. Historically informed readers may think they know what is coming. Surely, Zhu will overthrow the alien Yuan dynasty. Racked by famine, plagued by incessant uprisings, the Yuan dynasty is weak. The right man at the right place and time will topple China’s Mongol rulers and restore a Han emperor to the throne! 

Zhu Chongba fails at his first trial. After his father is killed by passing bandits, he falls into a deep depression and dies. 

Zhu Chongba has a sister.

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Eboni Dunbar’s 2020 Stone and Steel is a secondary universe fantasy novella.

After a two-year campaign, a victorious General Aaliyah returns to the city of Titus, the city-state on whose behalf she has been fighting. She expects to find a city reborn. She does not.

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Cynthia Zhang’s 2021 After the Dragons is an alternate-history climate-SF novel. 

In a history not too far from ours, dragons are real. They aren’t magical dragons (as so many literary dragons are) but utterly mundane animals. Western and Eastern dragons thrived in different niches, which meant that the land-dwelling Western dragons were expunged as inconvenient, whereas the largely aquatic Eastern dragons survive to this day. Thanks to climate change, the Eastern dragons may join their cousins in extinction. 

Still, if someone wants to study dragons, China is the place to do so. Dragon research lures mixed-race Eli from America to China. This confers on Eli many interesting experiences, not least of which is being regarded as an inexplicable foreign oddity.

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Darcie Little Badger’s 2020 Elatsoe is a young adult contemporary fantasy novel. Elatsoe has been nominated for both the Lodestar Award and the Norton Award. 

Kirby was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. But Elatsoe — Ellie to her friends — can summon the dead back from the other side. Dead that include her beloved dog, Kirby. 

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Nghi Vo’s 2021 The Chosen and The Beautiful is a standalone fantasy reimagining of The Great Gatsby.

Chic athlete Jordan Baker is one of the Louisville Bakers. She is also Vietnamese (or as Americans of Jazz Age America call it, ​“Tonkinese”); she was saved from certain death by Miss Eliza Baker when Jordan was just a baby. Jordan’s social set see Jordan as delightfully exotic, a perfect China¹ doll whom they certainly don’t mean when they discuss the need to expel Asians and other races from the US in a bid to keep America white. 

Despite the background anxiety of the impending Manchester Act², which will both hinder immigration from unworthy nations and facilitate the return to said nations of persons no longer deemed suitable for the US by its white elites, Jordan’s life is a whirlwind of parties, booze, and casual lovers of both sexes. This giddy existence is going to be greatly complicated by close chum Daisy Buchanan.

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Veronica G. Henry’s 2021 Bacchanal is a standalone historical fantasy novel. 

Baton Rogue in 1939 has very little to recommend itself to Eliza Meek. It’s too bad that having landed in Baton Rogue, Eliza has yet to find the means to escape it. Not only is Eliza on the wrong side of the colour line, but her unusual talents terrify the citizens of Baton Rouge. 

Salvation arrives in the form of the Bacchanal Carnival. 

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Ciannon Smart’s 2021 Witches Steeped in Gold is a young-adult secondary-universe fantasy novel. It is Smart’s debut novel.

A decade before the novel opens, Judair Cariot, Witches Council Doyenne, deposed Empress Cordelia Adair. In the ten years since, Judair has ruled the island of Aiyca with an iron hand. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. Which could be a grave, as was true for more than one of the Adair clan. 

Judair’s despised daughter Jazmyne is as unhappy as anyone with her mother’s punitive rule. She has covertly joined the resistance. Which would be a death sentence in itself, were she to be found out, but … there’s another reason to be afraid. Judair is as ruthless to her family as she is to her subjects. Judair sacrificed her own daughter, Jazmyne’s sister Madisyn, after deciding that Madisyn wasn’t fit for purpose. Jazmyne might be next. 

Jazmyne is proceeding according to a cautious, methodical plan. This is about to be junked by a huge monkey-wrench of a development.

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June Hur’s 2021 The Forest of Stolen Girls is a standalone historical mystery. 

Disguised as a man, armed with her father Detective Min Jewoo’s half-burned notebook, Min Hwani returns to the island of Jeju, hoping to learn why her father vanished there. Hwani has not seen Jeju in five years, not since Jewoo accepted a promotion to a better position on the mainland and the family moved. Hwani doesn’t want to return, but she has a filial duty to find her father or at least find out what happened to him. Detecting isn’t proper female behavior, but filial duty trumps convention. 

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B. Sharise Moore’s 2021Dr. Marvellus Djinn’s Odd Scholars is a standalone young-adult historical fantasy.

1920: four lucky scholars will win a chance to tour Dr. Marvellus Djinn’s the Motherland, a theme park no doubt as wonderous as its creator. After all, how could the Scholar of Sorcery (widely known to have survived a white lynch mob) fail to create something unparalleled in theme park history? 

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