This series. This FUCKING series. Its so fucking good. Its sooooo good!!! It's 7 books in all (plus 1 collection of short stories) and they're all at least very good. It can be intimidating since it's a pretty long series BUT they're all pretty standalone still. My favourite turned out to be the 3rd book, as it best meshed the adventure and intrigue styles, which the other books tend to stick mostly to one of. My only critiques really are that some parts are really.... unpleasant to read, given the situation the characters find themselves in, and sometimes these parts reeeeally overstay their welcome. Book 4 Im looking at you(....I skimmed over like half of this book for this reason). Regardless of that though, these books are still great, the characters are amazing, and the many many times and ways Seregil and Alec were tastefully described as fucking was 100/10.

From great to bad. Ok maybe thats a bit harsh but this book is just uninspired and uninspiring, probanbly the most “young adult” of the books I read this year? Like, yeah its cute and all, and the romance is... fine? But nothing happens in this book. There's one actual good moment that's when the MC is kidnapped (not a spoiler, it's in the synopsis) and that chunk of pages was actually engaging, but then... nothing. Or essentially nothing. The ‘mystery' the book proposes is the barest of bones of one, and the ending absolutely sucked: a sudden problem solved by an even more sudden solution, all in less than 20 pages. Idk maybe this one really was just too juvenile for me, I imagine if I read it at like 12 or 13 I'd have liked it, or at least enjoyed it more.

This is another one that felt ‘young adult', it's very much a fantasy adventure book, if that makes sense. An unlikely band of heroes set out to defeat the bad guy, get the thing and save the land, yadda yadda. But... it's pretty good! The unlikely heroes are all pretty likeable and their dynamic fun, the pacing's pretty good, the setting interesting... Everything just clicked, really, this was a fun time.

The harshest thing I can say about these books is that the author plans 9 of em and only 3 are out. I just. Really really loved these ones, the characters are great, the plots are fun, even if they get pretty dark sometimes (mostly on book 2)... They're contemporary fantasy and, I'll be honest, when I first picked up The Last Sun I thought I'd hate it. A lot of swearing, a lot of action-movie action, the mc loves his quips... honestly if I hadn't known it was gay It's not a book I'd pick up. But I was wrong! And everything works. The world created (where atlantis had revealed itself to the world and is now a modern day city with it's own intricacies and conspiracies) is so engaging, it really shows its own culture and how it intertwined with today's world. And very much today's world, the 3rd book even brings up COVID. Really... I just can't wait for the next books.

I'm talking about this one right after the Tarot Sequence cause they feel very similar. Not really in terms of plot, but they feel both like offshoots of the same base idea of magic in the real current world, there's probably overlapping inspiration there. And... it's fine! I can't really say why, but even though I liked this book well enough it just didn't grab me like the other books I enoyed on this list did. Maybe it's the pacing, maybe it's my growing familiarity with gay fantasy (this is the last book I finished out of these) but it just... fell short I guess. Or maybe it's the fact that really this book feels very.... “american”, in the sense that it's really about some specific american things or experiences, I guess, and I'm not american. I can try and imagine everyone's accent as described, sure, but it's not bringing along the baggage that's there if you know these places first or second hand. Can't say I enoyed the very brief but unnecessary cliffhanger though ...but I'll still read the rest of the series, and hope they get better.

This book is all intrigue, essentially, and I... liked it? I think? It has similar problems to In Deeper Waters, where nothing reeeally happens till it does all at once, but it managed that pacing much better than Waters did, first by having the nothing happenning actually feel like a buildup, slow as it was, and second by having the story be actually about politics and schemes and intrigue, so it warrants its own slowness. Most of these characters are assholes though

Another slow one, but this time a proper slow adventure, rather than intrigue drama, I guess. I.... don't really wanna talk to much about this one. It's gay and it isn't, it flows nicely, and everythings well painted but... it made me feel a lot of conflicting feelings which left me very down for several days, but I think that was because of personal feelings as to what happens here. So yeah. Idk. Can't really say I disliked it but it doesn't feel right to say I did, either. The title doesn't really make a lot of sense though, that's for certain.

A duology of short books that can best be described as squandered potential. Man, I liked the first book. It's short, its sweet, sure the pacings not that great and this is definetly a fanfic that was repurposed into a book, but it's good! It has a feel, the way the magic things, the wood itself is decribed is good, its intriguing, it made me think “oh thats a cool way to describe these things that are happenning!”. And then the second book just. Has the same characters, has the same magic things but. Does absolutely nothing with it. The interesting descriptions? Maybe a couple of passages but they don't make up for the bad plot and pacing this time. There was the opportunity for a great ending, one which would actually made you feel things, but it dropped the ball so hard. Bleh.

This is the first book I read this year! And really, a great way to start. Its an edwardian fantasy with a veeery interesting magic system, a cool plot, good characters, if a tad tropey. I had a lot of fun reading this one! Part of that may be the posh englishmen suddenly talking about cock, and me getting sucker punched by eplicit sex scenes which I did exxpect. Either way, the sequel just came out and I'm excited to see if it can keep up with the first one. It's apparently about lesbians, which is fun.

I think this is the only properly not gay book I read this year. That aside, I loved this book!!!! Like, a lot!!!!! The worldbuilding is really good, leaving a lot of space open for exploration, but it does lean heavily into fantasy mumbo jumbo, as in, boy does this book have a looot of hard names to remember. There's a glossary of sorts at the end but most of the times I went to it for help, it didn't have the word. That aside, it was enjoyable the whole way through. It's another story of political intrigue and schemig, not a lot of action, but the pacing somehow still feels so fast!! It's about the youngest son of the emperor, who had no training and no expectations of becoming emperor himself and surprise! The crown lands on his head, essentially, and then about how isolated he feels due to his new position and how he navigates his relations when there are so many epectations of him. Its really good. It almost seemed like unearthing treasure when I later found out that there are sequels and the sequels actually do have a gay main character. Read this book.