Lucas Stoffel

"The Night Circus" Book Review: I have read a lot of books. Hundreds of books. And if you asked me to pick one — one book, one world I could live inside forever — it would be this one without hesitation. The Night Circus is my favorite book, and I am not being hyperbolic. I mean it in the way that some people mean it when they talk about a song that changed their life or a place they visited that rearranged something in their brain. This book rearranged me.

"The Nightmare Before Kissmas" Book Review: Okay, here's the pitch: holidays are kingdoms. Christmas, Halloween, Easter — each one is ruled by a royal family. The Prince of Christmas is a golden-hearted himbo named Coal who's disillusioned with the whole Santa PR machine. The Prince of Halloween is a brooding, dark-magic-wielding disaster named Hex. They're rivals. Then they're not.

Let me get something out of the way: A Court of Thorns and Roses is a Beauty and the Beast retelling set in a faerie realm, and if that sentence makes you roll your eyes, this book is not for you. If that sentence makes you lean forward, buckle up. Sarah J. Maas wrote the book that essentially invented modern romantasy as a cultural force, and whether you love it or resist it, you have to reckon with it.

The Magician King is a better book than The Magicians, and I say that as someone who already gave The Magicians five stars. What Grossman does here — structurally, emotionally, thematically — is one of the bravest things I've seen a fantasy writer attempt.

The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage) is a prequel. Lyra is a baby, placed in the care of the nuns at Godstow Priory. Malcolm Polstead is eleven, the son of innkeepers, curious and brave and utterly ordinary in the way that Pullman's best characters are ordinary — which is to say, not at all. Malcolm's daemon Asta hasn't settled yet. He works at the inn, spies on the scholars who drink there, and becomes increasingly aware that the Magisterium's Consistorial Court of Discipline

Lazlo Strange is a librarian who dreams of a lost city whose name was stolen from the minds of everyone who ever knew it. He calls it Weep, because that's all anyone can say when they try to remember. And from that single image — a city-shaped hole in the world's memory — Laini Taylor builds something breathtaking. Book Review

Magical children, a grumpy bureaucrat finding love, and a six-year-old Antichrist named Lucy who collects buttons and just wants people to like him. That's The House in the Cerulean Sea, and I'm not even slightly embarrassed by how much I loved it. TJ Klune — who won the Alex Award for this novel — writes the kind of fantasy that feels less like escapism and more like therapy.

If you've seen anyone screaming about Jacks the Prince of Hearts on BookTok or bookish Twitter, this is where the damage starts. Once Upon a Broken Heart is the first book in Stephanie Garber's series that leads to The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, and it's the doorway into one of the most addictive romantasy ships in recent memory. Evangeline Fox is desperate. The love of her life is about to marry someone else, and in her desperation she does the one t

Book two of the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, and the tension between Evangeline Fox and Jacks the Prince of Hearts just keeps building until you want to physically shake the book and scream at both of them. Evangeline is trying to break a curse — one of several that keep stacking up in this series like the worst kind of fairy-tale compound interest — while Jacks is doing that infuriating thing where an immortal Fate who has murdered people with a kiss tries very hard to p

Different book, different rules. This one is not a memoir and it is not part of The Warboy Chronicles. The Stardust Pirates is a queer YA horror novel loosely inspired by Peter Pan, set on a Philippine island where the magic is ancient and the grief is fresh. I wrote it. Early readers on Goodreads and NetGalley had things to say. Here is what they said. The Stardust Pirates follows Jack, a teenager who has taken on far too much responsibility far too young, and his best fr

Off to Be the Wizard asks one of the best questions in comedy sci-fi: what if a computer programmer discovered that reality is a simulation, found the source code, and immediately used it to give himself wizard powers in medieval England? Martin Banks is that programmer, and he is exactly as irresponsible as that premise suggests.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books that gets classified as a children's novel because the protagonists are children, but Madeleine L'Engle was writing about the nature of evil, the structure of the universe, and the terrifying power of conformity, and she wasn't simplifying any of it. Meg Murry is thirteen, angry, brilliant at math, and terrible at fitting in. Her father, a physicist, has been missing for over a year. Her mother — also a scientist, also beautiful, whi