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Strange the Dreamer Book Review: The Most Beautiful Prose I've Read in YA Fantasy
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

Luke Stoffel
2 min read


The House in the Cerulean Sea Book Review: Yes, the Antichrist Is Adorable
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.

Luke Stoffel
2 min read


Once Upon a Broken Heart Book Review: Where the Jacks Obsession Begins
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

Luke Stoffel
2 min read


The Ballad of Never After Book Review: Peak Romantasy Drama, and I Mean That as the Highest Compliment
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

Luke Stoffel
2 min read


The Stardust Pirates Book Review: A Queer YA Horror That Feels Like a Sunset You Cannot Look Away From
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

Luke Stoffel
3 min read


Off to Be the Wizard Book Review: A Programmer Finds a File That Controls Reality and Does Exactly What You'd Do
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.

Luke Stoffel
2 min read


A Wrinkle in Time Book Review: The Children's Book That Terrified Me
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

Luke Stoffel
3 min read
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