The Bride Stone, Sally Gardner

Book Title: The Bride Stone

Author: Sally Gardner

Date Started: December 22nd  2025

Date Completed: December 29th 2025

Genres: Historical, Romance, Mystery

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆ 

I read Sally Gardner books when I was a kid and loved her writing. I've been meaning to pick up another of her books for a long, long time. While The Bride Stone's contents definitely mark it for mature readers, it still has that spark of adventure I remember from all those years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Gardner's historical settings are always so immersive; the accuracy of speech and society is always enough to feel real and like you're in the hands of someone who knows what they're talking about, but without giving you a history lesson and impeding on the story at its core.

I was pleasantly surprised when the story switched from period romance drama to murder mystery in the second half, throwing the characters and events we had grown to love into peril in a way we were just as anxious as Duval for the truth to be discovered. Ultimately, there was a bit more period romancing than I was expecting, but the way the story unfolded throughout left plenty of plot and intrigue to balance it out.

Owl King, Bex Hogan

Book Title: Owl King

Author: Bex Hogan

Series: Faery Realm #2

Date Started: December 17th  2025

Date Completed: December 21st 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Romance

Quality Rating: Two Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Two Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

Around this time last year, I read two books next to each other with Nettle in the title. One was great (Nettle and Bone, turns out), the other was meh. I mistakenly thought this was the sequel to the first, but it was the latter. Oops.

I think overall, I found it unsatisfying as it felt like a children's book (but with a more mature world?). There is charm in the 1001 Nights structure (though it misses the opportunity to truly expand the worldbuilding within it), but the pacing is all over the place. I read Owl King in four sittings, and while the adventure isn't that expansive, an awful lot is going on that I had to remind myself of between readings. There's also a significant role by the first book's protagonist, Nettle, but frankly all of it was lost on me because I have no memory of the actual events of the first one.

My primary resistance to this book itself (rather than just being confused) was the romance and portrayal of abuse, especially as it's a novel intended for younger readers. The titular Owl King is the well-trodden tyrant who takes multiple wives after the last one mysteriously perishes - but worry not, our protagonist's sister will be forced to marry him and, wait for it, fix him of course! I'm being hyperbolic, but 'the magic was too strong' is an awfully convenient excuse for a supposedly reformed serial killer of women to revert to their old ways. However much the plotline may be 'tied up' by the end doesn't relieve the uncomfortable feeling that sat with me through most of the book.

I'm not sure when it happened but the 'save my sister' storyline needs to go into the YA cliche canon. It has very little room for anything other than repetition and seems to just excuse any life-threatening or impossible tasks completely out of its own stakes. I do appreciate the genre's evolution beyond true love's devotion, but I think we've hit another rut - or maybe we just need to be more creative with the concept? Either way, it's another one for the cliche list.

A Small Matter of Impending Catastrophe, Derek Landy

Book Title: A Small Matter of Impending Catastrophe

Author: Derek Landy

Series: Skulduggery Pleasant

Date Started: December 5ht 2025

Date Completed: December 17th 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

These audiobook/podcasts are great and I'm really pleased they're clearly doing well enough to make more of them - but they don't really translate into novels. While taking the full advantage of a sound-based medium, using music to solve puzzles and showcasing a low-vision character in strokes of genius, the charm of its performance is mostly lost in translation.

Without space for Derek's token action sequences and environmental storytelling, you end up with a lot of new information shared very quickly in these novella-style stories. I've found it harder to connect with the characters as most of their personality exists in long conversations (minus the voice acting) on the page, and the pure and simple mystery genre misses out on some of the cross-boundary flairs of the main series.

Despite my lower-than-usual rating of the book, I really do enjoy the audio productions and think the episodic podcast style works really nicely. The sound designers, directors and actors all do a fantastic job of bringing Derek's unique humour to life and I'm excited to see what new stories they'll do with it - I would love them to develop into multi-part stories with proper character arcs, as that seems to be the missing ingredient holding it back.

Tales from Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin

Book Title: Tales from Earthsea

Author: Ursula Le Guin

Series: Earthsea Cycle #5

Date Started: October 18th  2025

Date Completed: November 25th 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Five Stars

Review:

I've never been a huge fan of short stories - especially novella-collections mid-series - but, as Le Guin rightly explains, an interlude for exploring the past was calling for the world of Earthsea. In her afterword, she talks about the 'now' of fictional stories moving, continuing to grow as reality does. And Le Guin's work is so rooted in the realities of gender pollitics, spiritual connection to the ever-changing natural world, and the nature of power and the self, that you leave this book feeling not like you've read a handful of mini-stories but instead as if you've sifted through an atlas.

I thoroughly enjoyed most of these stories, particularly Dragonfly at the end which is an epic in its own rite. Each story has its own masterfully crafted characters, and touches almost every subject we've grown used to in this series - but the environments in which they do so are unfamiliar for the most part. That's what really showcases the range of the Matriarch of Modern Fantasy: people may be familiar and comforting to us, but throw a fish out of water and it has to learn to adapt, however much of a struggle. That's how people, and cultures, and worlds change.

Few foreword/afterwords are as elevanting as Le Guin's. She uses them to take the reader on the journey she walked as a storyteller, and they amplify the themes and feelings of her stories into treasures beyond the enjoyment of the experience. I've learnt more about storytelling through her commentaries on her own work that many writing courses I've taken.

My quest to complete the Earthsea Cycle is drawing to a close, and the anticipation of the climax has never been higher. Over the last few years I've been trying to complete book series I began in my childhood/teenage years, and cross off the ones I've had sitting on my shelf for ages. Le Guin's work is probably my favourite of all the series I've tried to finish, and it'll sit on my shelf even after it's done for a long, long time.

Katabasis, R.F. Kuang

Book Title: Katabasis

Author: R.F. Kuang

Date Started: September 13th 2025

Date Completed: October 20th 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Romance

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

I found the start of Katabasis hard to get into; supposedly straight into the action, but there is so much it wants to tell us it takes 100 pages for the story to gain its footing. Once it does, though it meanders at times, it's undoubtedly Kuang's most innovative fantasy yet. I was getting strong Boy and the Heron and His Dark Materials and vibes - but Kuang is distinctive in where she takes it for the ending.

I'd be curious to see what someone with 0 Classics/Philosophy knowledge finds it; I know a handful of the references via my interest in mythical folklore and Ancient Greece, but I was mostly just nodding along in acceptance of my confusion. It led to an interesting conversation with my mum (who has a PhD in Political Science), but I came out of it ultimately none the wiser. Perhaps if you know none of it you can buy into the fantastical side a bit more.

And boy is the magic system and world-building creative - insanely so. I know to expect scales of epic proportion when it comes to the universes Kuang wills into being for us, but almost every time she builds on her wealth of knowledge, curiosity, intelligence and pure joy for creating these imaginary plains of existence. Katabasis especially made me appreciate the philosophical way she approaches storytelling: it's not really about creating a world to tell her story in, it's about repositioning your way of thinking so that you're open to the story she's ready to tell. It's ultimately why her novels are so universal, despite their authentic roots in Kuang's own studies, heritage and temperament: what she asks of the reader is to join her in looking at something from a different perspective, and discovering what it leads to together.

While the book is ultimately a character story (though Alice's agency for what happens to her is unreliable), I really enjoyed the exploration of corruption, discrimination and toxicity of gatekeeping education and imbalanced mentor-student relationships. It rang so universally true for imbalanced power structures, even though it focuses very specifically on academia, and made such an impact on the development of the characters without having to be the main plot. Alice is the person who toils, fails, suffers and grows - and the book doesn't flinch from that anchor - but it has an awful lot to say about the hypocrisy of what people expect her to grow into. And a final act that is satisfyingly resolute in its answer.

The One Hundred Nights of Hero, Isabel Greenberg

Book Title: The One Hundred Nights of Hero

 Author: Isabel Greenberg

Date Started: September 18th 2025

Date Completed: September 19th 2025

Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Romance

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Star

Final Rating: Five Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆ 

Since reading this graphic novel for the first time in 2017, it has been amongst my favourite books of all time, forever. At a time when I was finding my voice as a storyteller and recognising the patterns and power hierarchies and magic in the world, it was entirely pivotal to my worldview and my own sense of justice and worth. For the longest time, I was adamant that I wanted to adapt it when I became a filmmaker.

You can understand my heartbreak, then, when it was announced that an adaptation was in fact being made, directed by Julia Jackson, starring Emma Corin, Maika Monroe, Nicholas Galitzine and more. That heartbreak didn't last very long though, because it was being made, and well by the looks of things. Having secured tickets to the BFI London Film Festival Closing Gala of the film thanks to a friend, and preparing for the premiere of my second short film, itself inspired by myth, I knew I needed to reread it. I was not disappointed.

The One Hundred Nights of Hero is a story about storytellers, about courage in the face of fascism, and about the preciousness of words and the agency to use them for good. You never know what world a book or film or any other form of art will be released into; these days, by the time people see the final thing, it's been a long time since it was created. But some works of art ring true - sometimes even more so - when they're released. It's what makes them wild, and why the audience are part of their creation.

The point of fairy tales is sometimes oversimplified or sometimes objectively miscategorised as stories teaching people moral tales. If you'd like to avoid a little academic context, skip these two paragraphs, because I wrote my dissertation on this stuff and I'll be damned if I'm not using it. Moral tales, generally, actually align with animal tales or fables - two of the six types of traditional oral storytelling genres. Mythology and legends, intrinsically tied to religion, explore concepts of right and wrong in their respective cultures.

But fairy tales and folklore (generally speaking) were special because they weren't made to instruct, but to cope. We largely believe fairy tales and folklore to have been created by the people, for the people, in times of upheaval and persecution, prejudice and against the unfathomable natural world. They weren't stories that told you what to do if you ever found yourself in a certain situation; they were stories that said, if this ever befalls you, you have survived and this is how you get up again. They are, at their core, about making knowledge and courage accessible to all. This is why the characters in fairy tales and folklore are largely unnamed and predominantly without identifying features in the way that legends and myths distinguish mortals and deities, and how animal tales and fables paint certain character traits as animalistic stereotypes.

So, then, this fairy tale of epic proportions, inspired by timeless classics like A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Twelve Dancing Princesses, is about storytellers telling stories in the face of fear and oppression. Okay, sure, simple enough, we've seen it all before, right? The market is undeniably now richer with narratives inspired by these ancient traditions, but in the eight years since I first read this book, I still haven't experienced something that came close to its gentleness, its defiance and its acknowledgement of pain that comes along with it all. Hero and Cherry, and their characters and ancestors, and even the men around them (good boys, just like Paris Paloma says) all suffer from the society and traditions they have been locked within, and pushing against it draws blood. It's scary. But the stories patch them together again. They teach us to get up again.

A Court of Wings and Ruin, Sarah J. Maas

Book Title: A Court of Wings and Ruin

Author: Sarah J. Maas

Series: A Court of Thorns and Roses #3

Date Started: August 22nd  2025

Date Completed: September 13th 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Romance, Adventure, Action

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

I'm gradually coming around to the ACOTAR series, after absolutely hating the first one - but it just doesn't compare to Throne of Glass for me. It's a lot of fun, I raced through the just-about-700 pages and didn't want to put it down, but ultimately I don't connect with the characters. Nesta is my favourite - and feels the more real, presents conflict but is grounded in a compelling narrative arc - and while I like the others, I don't feel close to them which brings the stakes down by quite a bit.

Maas is renowned for the grandeur of her worlds and their places, cultures and politics. But A Court of Wings and Ruin reminded me how great she is at writing battles, in a way that allows the plot to flow through and heighten the excitement. There's just enough action to feel epic, enough chaos to intimidate, but not so bogged down in the movements and strategy that the story is sacrificed.

It firmly feels that this was originally written as a trilogy that then expanded, and while I was a little disapponted at the lack of character deaths and long-standing loss for the world, I really enjoyed the way Maas satisfyingly wrapped up the story, but left the door open just enough for another - which it evidently went on to do and perhaps will continue to.